Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

There is very little enjoyable about the book. The author deliberately shows the methodical destruction and intentional killing of a people and its culture by exposing the crime in their own words. The author brilliantly does this by crafting expertly written sentences and paragraphs that need to be read several times to gain the full magnitude of their weight. Two observations regarding time in history come to mind in regards to this book. Most of all when the war was started the plan was already in effect to destroy the people of Eastern Europe. In fact, the Germans had visions of the solider who was also a farmer on the fridges of their nation. The speed at which they acted was astonishing. The same could be said about how quickly they fell. They took 90 minutes, including drinks and light snacks, at the Wannasee Conference to determine the fate of millions of people in Europe. The arrogance is astounding and the depravity shocking. Arguably the most disturbing parts of this book were how blatant the Nazi program was. They made clear from the start they felt Eastern Europe belonged to German and they had no intentions of keeping anyone alive for long who stood in their way. What was shocking to me was the massive amount of assistance they received from people who lived in these areas. Latvian, Ukrainian paramilitary units and volunteers helped them in their work and many of them never saw a day in court. And that may be the thing that stays with me the longest after reading this book. How many “volunteers” were never brought to justice for the murder and looting of a collective soul of Europe. A friend of mine once said Ireland has a history that would make a stone weep. I think the same could be said about Poland and the Ukraine. These wounds are still open. The scares can still be seen. If you would like to have more information about the Holocaust I would recommend reading, Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men, Judgement before Nuremberg by Greg Dawson and any book by Deborah Libstadt.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana's well-worn quotation applies to nearly all reading and writing of Holocaust history, and Richard Rhodes' Masters of Death is no different. In it, Rhodes chronicles the misdeeds of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi death squads which followed the German army's invasion of Eastern Europe and murdered over 1.3 million Jewish civilians at gunpoint (over 2 million people including non-Jewish civilians). These events were the precursors to the infamous concentration camps, but have not received the same historical attention. Like any treatment of this dark chapter in human history, it is impossible to judge Rhodes' book by the normal standards of entertainment value or overall positive impact. The best these works can do is remain faithful to the truth, educate the greater public as much as possible and pass judgement when necessary. In these capacities, Masters of Death is a success. Rhodes gives close attention to the anti-Semitic language and mythology used to attempt to justify these atrocities and offers significant insight into the psychology of the major Einsatzgruppen figures, including Heinrich Himmler, the National Leader of the Schutzstaffel (SS, the Nazi defense force), as well as many commanders and soldiers of individual Einsatzgruppen commandos. In these portraits, he draws heavily on criminologist Lonnie Athens' theory of the four stages of violent development, returning to Athens throughout the text for evidence that the individual in question had achieved a level of violent socialization. For the most part, Rhodes does well to let the sheer truth speak for itself in his accounts of the mass executions, describing the incidents in honestly graphic detail, but refraining from significant embellishment and only occasionally pausing to remind the reader that the soldiers who carried out these executions acted of their own free will, that they followed the orders of their superiors but recognized the criminality of their actions. At times, the narrator Rhodes even seems to disappear from the text, an absence that might be unwelcome for other, less weighty subjects, but one which well suits an account of an atrocity of this magnitude. The structure of the first few chapters is a bit jarring; Rhodes moves from the creation of the Einsatzgruppen to Athens' theory, back to the German army's assault on Soviet territories that prompted the Einsatzgruppen's actions, and then to a two-chapter mini-biography of Himmler, before finally settling into a chronological description of the death squads' movements through Eastern Europe about a third of the way into the text. Nevertheless, for those who wish to understand this hidden chapter of the Holocaust, Masters of Death provides a more than adequate depiction.

As other reviewers have pointed out: this book is graphic and certainly one of the darkest pieces of literature that I've ever read. For some, it might be too disturbing. However, if the reader can look past that, or at least digest it in small bits, it is an excellent book when it comes to shedding light on not only how the tasks of the Nazi death squads were logistically conducted, but how Nazi leaders could train their soldiers to accept and actively participate in violence of this magnitude. It's easy to disassociate the violence of the Holocaust in terms of facts you read about on paper versus the explicit, graphic and brutal nature of what it looked like through the eyes of someone who was there. It's one thing to read a statistic about how the Einsatzgruppen death squads murdered more than one million people during the course of the war in the Soviet Union. It's another thing to read witness testimony about the details of what that looks like. And this book goes the distance to display the horrors of these crimes in full. There is a demon in every man, and it stirs when you put a gun in his hand and give them carte blanche to kill under the auspices of racial superiority.

This book is a rare find. It covers a piece of World War Two that most books gloss over at best. This book offers up a very detailed history of the infamous SS Einsatzgruppen troops. These were the special units the SS put together to go into occupied Eastern Europe to kill Jews. The book offers a great deal of information about these units. The book is full of horrific story after horrific story about the work of these units. The way the stories are told is very enlightening. They are told almost like a news story, as they unfold. That makes the story come more alive, and thus more scary. The abundance of these stories is almost overwhelming. It is told through various first person accounts with graphic detail. This book doesn't stop there. The book describes how they came together. It dives into the details of the emotional aspect of the killing on the troops. What they did as a unit did impact them as individuals. I found that very interesting. The killing toll drove the men crazy. It created a blood lust of sorts. The guilt weighted heavy on them. They either became 24/7 drunks or individual homicidal manics. The lack of speed of killing in the eyes of their Berlin HQ led them to create "the final solution". That is the death camp system. The down side of the book is the lack of the big picture. The story gets lost of the blood filled stories. The ending epilogue chapter is very interesting too. The author gives a break down of what happened to the various key personnel of the groups. I think this book has to be the only one like it or definitely one of a few.

Rhodes is one of my favorite authors and this is book is a reason why. It so so thorough and well laid out that I actually had trouble reading it because of the content. I haven't come across many books on this subject that were so detailed and graphic, I think I am glad for this. Reading more than a chapter of two at a time was difficult. So be ready for that

I've read Browning's Ordinary Men and Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners and am still fascinated by the subject, so I picked up this highly rated book, too. The violent socialization theory that Rhodes puts forth at the onset of the book is probably pretty spot-on, but this really wasn't the strength of the book (answering the question, "How did this happen?"). Rather, the strength of the book was a comprehensive look at how the Final Solution was started, evolved and arrived to where it was in the latter stages of the war. The backdrop of how the propaganda was used to convince the general populace and the perpetrators themselves that the "dirty job" at hand was necessary was powerful stuff. My one criticism of the book is exactly what made it powerful at the end of reading. For a while in the middle of the book, it just drudges on page after page with "They entered town X, they gathered up the Jewish population, they killed Y people". Page after page. Town after town. The inserted first hand accounts at each location helped to keep the reader going flipping the pages. But several time I asked myself, "How many times do I have to read the same thing over and over?" But after a while, that starts to sink in and the magnitude of it all begins to become clearer. At points Rhodes editorializes a bit, especially when discussing Himmler, resorting to name-calling and finger pointing. Honestly, it was unnecessary and probably accomplished the opposite of what it intended. To demonize Himmler and other leaders who so willingly spurned the program onward, to strip them of their humanity and every shred of their decency only serves to insulate us and them from the full reality of what they did. Himmler WASN'T a complete bestial monster (as Rhodes evidenced in many of his anecdotes). He struggled mightily at times with what he was doing. He did feel some compassion for the victims. These facts are what makes the condemnation of him all the more stronger. He felt these things and pushed forward aggressively regardless...making his crimes all the more heinous. So, as a history book, I'd highly recommend it. For insights into those at the top of the Nazi organization, I'd highly recommend it. For insights into the men who pulled the trigger time after time, I think Browning's book is far superior.

The scale of death, terror, and utter macabre horror contain within the covers of this text document the actions of the SS Sonderkommandos and Einsatzgruppen as they rampaged through out the Eastern occupied territories implementing the first phase of Hitler's and Himmler's final solution. Mr. Rhodes has written a masterpiece that must have almost driven him insane to work on. This text will keep you awake at night and make you shudder and weep. The human feeling conveyed from the pages of this book are much more intense than "Hitler's willing executioners" and the social theory arguments tend to seem more complete but are not thoroughly defended or brought to a believable conclusion. The book ends rather weakly with a brief run down of the fates of the Einsatzgruppen leaders and a brief quote from a survivor of a "Jewish aktion". The social theory and the ending should not be used to judge the value of this book. Reading this book is incredibly hard and depressing; the only good feeling it evoked was pride for the veterans of the war against Germany for surely they were fighting against the darkest of evil. As a person of European (mostly German) heritage, I felt utter disbelief that human beings could have carried out the mass slaughters but the historical record is clear. Entire villages, cities, and countries were rendered "Judenfrei" in the personal, face to face, shooting executions conducted. Men, women, children, even diapered infants were all brutally exterminated, thousands at a time. This book is essential to understanding the development of the concentration camp system from the actions of the death squads and the history of the Jewish Holocaust. It is a who's who of the beginnings of the Nazi extermination program and contains details that I had not read about previously ("Sardinenpackung" for one chilling example). It documents the impact of the mass murders on the killers who suffered mental breakdowns and other psychological traumas - proof in my mind that they knew what they were doing was illegal and morally indefensible. It also documents the participation of numerous auxiliary units - Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian etc. who aided and conducted murders on massive scales as well. The Holocaust may have been a German invention, but the participation and the guilt incorporated much of Europe as well. The social theory of brutalization explains a great deal of how the killers came to be conditioned to accept, participate and even enjoy the daily murders, it does not however satisfy every question that may be raised. I would propose that a total understanding of murder on this scale may never be understood by the civilized world, it simply lies beyond what is comprehensible. This book damns the Einsatzgruppen with their own reports and letters home, including the infamous Jager report. Men, women, and children were all shot or dumped indiscriminately into killing pits through out Eastern Europe, murder on a massive scale became simply a logistics problem to be solved. Children were murdered in separate pits so that the adult corpses could be better arranged. Tens of thousands were shot in a single day, at a single site by a handful of executioners. The depth of the horror unleashed on the heals of Operation Barbarossa is inconceivable. The true value of this book is so that the future of millions of husbands, wives, grandparents, sons, and daughters should not have been lost in vain. Read this text and you will never be able forget.

Although there were anti-semitic feelings and actions well before the Nazi era, this book describes in chilling detail the beginning of the organized Nazi effort to eradicate an entire people. I would recommend "SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust" to anyone interested in WW ll, mob psychology and history of the Jewish people as well as to everyone who truly believes that NEVER AGAIN should genocide (against any group) happen.

Rhodes' great and important book should be required reading for all students of history. Really, it should be required reading in schools. The level of depravity German soldiers displayed - and nearly all got away with - is mind numbing. Some have complained about the excessive details that describe the numerous executions, and the repetitiveness of them. I'm not sure I understand that complaint at all. Should truth be whitewashed or glossed over to make the reader's experience more pleasurable? Anyone who thinks so is reading the wrong book. I grew up just minutes away from "Babi Yar," the ravine in Kiev where Nazis slaughtered the largest amount of victims at a single location. For many years now there have been some random department stores just across the street from it. It no longer looks like a killing site: the ravine is no longer especially deep and in the warm months it is covered with grass. Decades after the war, me and my friends, running around the largely still undeveloped wooded area on the edge of which Babi Yar is located, we never came too close to it except to stare at the monument of writing bodies that announces it.

Rhodes is one of my favorite writers of non-fiction. His book The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the best book I have ever read on the subject. He has also written interesting books on disease and the psychology of murder. In fact, this book seems to have grown from his study of the work of Lonnie Athens, an American criminologist, who was the subject of Rhodes' last book, Why They Kill. Here Rhodes investigates the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the teams of killers in Hitler's Germany who would begin the slaughters that would become the Holocaust. When most of us think of the Holocaust, we think of death camps like Auschwitz, the gas chambers and crematoria. What most people forget is that the earliest killings were done by groups of SS-Einsatzgruppen in the field. Literally millions of people were simply murdered through beatings, firing squads and other "basic" methods long before the construction of the first death camps. It was the effect of this "face-to-face" slaughter on the morale and morals of the men who carried it out that would lead to the more industrial, impersonal methods of the death camps in later years. Rhodes reminds of something very important in this book: yes, the Holocaust was a horrible thing but it was conducted by human beings, not monsters. The Holocaust did not just suddenly appear as a particularly horrible idea. The development of the Holocaust was a process that can be traced and, possibly, understood. And Rhodes makes an excellent stab at trying to understand what happened. In the process, he examines the psychology of people like Heinrich Himmler and many of the other people who attempted to carry out the Final Solution. Plus, he gives a fresh look at an important part of history that gets swamped in our knowledge of the Holocaust. It is well worth the read.

There is very little enjoyable about the book. The author deliberately shows the methodical destruction and intentional killing of a people and its culture by exposing the crime in their own words. The author brilliantly does this by crafting expertly written sentences and paragraphs that need to be read several times to gain the full magnitude of their weight. Two observations regarding time in history come to mind in regards to this book. Most of all when the war was started the plan was already in effect to destroy the people of Eastern Europe. In fact, the Germans had visions of the solider who was also a farmer on the fridges of their nation. The speed at which they acted was astonishing. The same could be said about how quickly they fell. They took 90 minutes, including drinks and light snacks, at the Wannasee Conference to determine the fate of millions of people in Europe. The arrogance is astounding and the depravity shocking. Arguably the most disturbing parts of this book were how blatant the Nazi program was. They made clear from the start they felt Eastern Europe belonged to German and they had no intentions of keeping anyone alive for long who stood in their way. What was shocking to me was the massive amount of assistance they received from people who lived in these areas. Latvian, Ukrainian paramilitary units and volunteers helped them in their work and many of them never saw a day in court. And that may be the thing that stays with me the longest after reading this book. How many “volunteers” were never brought to justice for the murder and looting of a collective soul of Europe. A friend of mine once said Ireland has a history that would make a stone weep. I think the same could be said about Poland and the Ukraine. These wounds are still open. The scares can still be seen. If you would like to have more information about the Holocaust I would recommend reading, Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men, Judgement before Nuremberg by Greg Dawson and any book by Deborah Libstadt.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana's well-worn quotation applies to nearly all reading and writing of Holocaust history, and Richard Rhodes' Masters of Death is no different. In it, Rhodes chronicles the misdeeds of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi death squads which followed the German army's invasion of Eastern Europe and murdered over 1.3 million Jewish civilians at gunpoint (over 2 million people including non-Jewish civilians). These events were the precursors to the infamous concentration camps, but have not received the same historical attention. Like any treatment of this dark chapter in human history, it is impossible to judge Rhodes' book by the normal standards of entertainment value or overall positive impact. The best these works can do is remain faithful to the truth, educate the greater public as much as possible and pass judgement when necessary. In these capacities, Masters of Death is a success. Rhodes gives close attention to the anti-Semitic language and mythology used to attempt to justify these atrocities and offers significant insight into the psychology of the major Einsatzgruppen figures, including Heinrich Himmler, the National Leader of the Schutzstaffel (SS, the Nazi defense force), as well as many commanders and soldiers of individual Einsatzgruppen commandos. In these portraits, he draws heavily on criminologist Lonnie Athens' theory of the four stages of violent development, returning to Athens throughout the text for evidence that the individual in question had achieved a level of violent socialization. For the most part, Rhodes does well to let the sheer truth speak for itself in his accounts of the mass executions, describing the incidents in honestly graphic detail, but refraining from significant embellishment and only occasionally pausing to remind the reader that the soldiers who carried out these executions acted of their own free will, that they followed the orders of their superiors but recognized the criminality of their actions. At times, the narrator Rhodes even seems to disappear from the text, an absence that might be unwelcome for other, less weighty subjects, but one which well suits an account of an atrocity of this magnitude. The structure of the first few chapters is a bit jarring; Rhodes moves from the creation of the Einsatzgruppen to Athens' theory, back to the German army's assault on Soviet territories that prompted the Einsatzgruppen's actions, and then to a two-chapter mini-biography of Himmler, before finally settling into a chronological description of the death squads' movements through Eastern Europe about a third of the way into the text. Nevertheless, for those who wish to understand this hidden chapter of the Holocaust, Masters of Death provides a more than adequate depiction.

As other reviewers have pointed out: this book is graphic and certainly one of the darkest pieces of literature that I've ever read. For some, it might be too disturbing. However, if the reader can look past that, or at least digest it in small bits, it is an excellent book when it comes to shedding light on not only how the tasks of the Nazi death squads were logistically conducted, but how Nazi leaders could train their soldiers to accept and actively participate in violence of this magnitude. It's easy to disassociate the violence of the Holocaust in terms of facts you read about on paper versus the explicit, graphic and brutal nature of what it looked like through the eyes of someone who was there. It's one thing to read a statistic about how the Einsatzgruppen death squads murdered more than one million people during the course of the war in the Soviet Union. It's another thing to read witness testimony about the details of what that looks like. And this book goes the distance to display the horrors of these crimes in full. There is a demon in every man, and it stirs when you put a gun in his hand and give them carte blanche to kill under the auspices of racial superiority.

This book is a rare find. It covers a piece of World War Two that most books gloss over at best. This book offers up a very detailed history of the infamous SS Einsatzgruppen troops. These were the special units the SS put together to go into occupied Eastern Europe to kill Jews. The book offers a great deal of information about these units. The book is full of horrific story after horrific story about the work of these units. The way the stories are told is very enlightening. They are told almost like a news story, as they unfold. That makes the story come more alive, and thus more scary. The abundance of these stories is almost overwhelming. It is told through various first person accounts with graphic detail. This book doesn't stop there. The book describes how they came together. It dives into the details of the emotional aspect of the killing on the troops. What they did as a unit did impact them as individuals. I found that very interesting. The killing toll drove the men crazy. It created a blood lust of sorts. The guilt weighted heavy on them. They either became 24/7 drunks or individual homicidal manics. The lack of speed of killing in the eyes of their Berlin HQ led them to create "the final solution". That is the death camp system. The down side of the book is the lack of the big picture. The story gets lost of the blood filled stories. The ending epilogue chapter is very interesting too. The author gives a break down of what happened to the various key personnel of the groups. I think this book has to be the only one like it or definitely one of a few.

Rhodes is one of my favorite authors and this is book is a reason why. It so so thorough and well laid out that I actually had trouble reading it because of the content. I haven't come across many books on this subject that were so detailed and graphic, I think I am glad for this. Reading more than a chapter of two at a time was difficult. So be ready for that

I've read Browning's Ordinary Men and Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners and am still fascinated by the subject, so I picked up this highly rated book, too. The violent socialization theory that Rhodes puts forth at the onset of the book is probably pretty spot-on, but this really wasn't the strength of the book (answering the question, "How did this happen?"). Rather, the strength of the book was a comprehensive look at how the Final Solution was started, evolved and arrived to where it was in the latter stages of the war. The backdrop of how the propaganda was used to convince the general populace and the perpetrators themselves that the "dirty job" at hand was necessary was powerful stuff. My one criticism of the book is exactly what made it powerful at the end of reading. For a while in the middle of the book, it just drudges on page after page with "They entered town X, they gathered up the Jewish population, they killed Y people". Page after page. Town after town. The inserted first hand accounts at each location helped to keep the reader going flipping the pages. But several time I asked myself, "How many times do I have to read the same thing over and over?" But after a while, that starts to sink in and the magnitude of it all begins to become clearer. At points Rhodes editorializes a bit, especially when discussing Himmler, resorting to name-calling and finger pointing. Honestly, it was unnecessary and probably accomplished the opposite of what it intended. To demonize Himmler and other leaders who so willingly spurned the program onward, to strip them of their humanity and every shred of their decency only serves to insulate us and them from the full reality of what they did. Himmler WASN'T a complete bestial monster (as Rhodes evidenced in many of his anecdotes). He struggled mightily at times with what he was doing. He did feel some compassion for the victims. These facts are what makes the condemnation of him all the more stronger. He felt these things and pushed forward aggressively regardless...making his crimes all the more heinous. So, as a history book, I'd highly recommend it. For insights into those at the top of the Nazi organization, I'd highly recommend it. For insights into the men who pulled the trigger time after time, I think Browning's book is far superior.

The scale of death, terror, and utter macabre horror contain within the covers of this text document the actions of the SS Sonderkommandos and Einsatzgruppen as they rampaged through out the Eastern occupied territories implementing the first phase of Hitler's and Himmler's final solution. Mr. Rhodes has written a masterpiece that must have almost driven him insane to work on. This text will keep you awake at night and make you shudder and weep. The human feeling conveyed from the pages of this book are much more intense than "Hitler's willing executioners" and the social theory arguments tend to seem more complete but are not thoroughly defended or brought to a believable conclusion. The book ends rather weakly with a brief run down of the fates of the Einsatzgruppen leaders and a brief quote from a survivor of a "Jewish aktion". The social theory and the ending should not be used to judge the value of this book. Reading this book is incredibly hard and depressing; the only good feeling it evoked was pride for the veterans of the war against Germany for surely they were fighting against the darkest of evil. As a person of European (mostly German) heritage, I felt utter disbelief that human beings could have carried out the mass slaughters but the historical record is clear. Entire villages, cities, and countries were rendered "Judenfrei" in the personal, face to face, shooting executions conducted. Men, women, children, even diapered infants were all brutally exterminated, thousands at a time. This book is essential to understanding the development of the concentration camp system from the actions of the death squads and the history of the Jewish Holocaust. It is a who's who of the beginnings of the Nazi extermination program and contains details that I had not read about previously ("Sardinenpackung" for one chilling example). It documents the impact of the mass murders on the killers who suffered mental breakdowns and other psychological traumas - proof in my mind that they knew what they were doing was illegal and morally indefensible. It also documents the participation of numerous auxiliary units - Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian etc. who aided and conducted murders on massive scales as well. The Holocaust may have been a German invention, but the participation and the guilt incorporated much of Europe as well. The social theory of brutalization explains a great deal of how the killers came to be conditioned to accept, participate and even enjoy the daily murders, it does not however satisfy every question that may be raised. I would propose that a total understanding of murder on this scale may never be understood by the civilized world, it simply lies beyond what is comprehensible. This book damns the Einsatzgruppen with their own reports and letters home, including the infamous Jager report. Men, women, and children were all shot or dumped indiscriminately into killing pits through out Eastern Europe, murder on a massive scale became simply a logistics problem to be solved. Children were murdered in separate pits so that the adult corpses could be better arranged. Tens of thousands were shot in a single day, at a single site by a handful of executioners. The depth of the horror unleashed on the heals of Operation Barbarossa is inconceivable. The true value of this book is so that the future of millions of husbands, wives, grandparents, sons, and daughters should not have been lost in vain. Read this text and you will never be able forget.

Although there were anti-semitic feelings and actions well before the Nazi era, this book describes in chilling detail the beginning of the organized Nazi effort to eradicate an entire people. I would recommend "SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust" to anyone interested in WW ll, mob psychology and history of the Jewish people as well as to everyone who truly believes that NEVER AGAIN should genocide (against any group) happen.

Rhodes' great and important book should be required reading for all students of history. Really, it should be required reading in schools. The level of depravity German soldiers displayed - and nearly all got away with - is mind numbing. Some have complained about the excessive details that describe the numerous executions, and the repetitiveness of them. I'm not sure I understand that complaint at all. Should truth be whitewashed or glossed over to make the reader's experience more pleasurable? Anyone who thinks so is reading the wrong book. I grew up just minutes away from "Babi Yar," the ravine in Kiev where Nazis slaughtered the largest amount of victims at a single location. For many years now there have been some random department stores just across the street from it. It no longer looks like a killing site: the ravine is no longer especially deep and in the warm months it is covered with grass. Decades after the war, me and my friends, running around the largely still undeveloped wooded area on the edge of which Babi Yar is located, we never came too close to it except to stare at the monument of writing bodies that announces it.

Rhodes is one of my favorite writers of non-fiction. His book The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the best book I have ever read on the subject. He has also written interesting books on disease and the psychology of murder. In fact, this book seems to have grown from his study of the work of Lonnie Athens, an American criminologist, who was the subject of Rhodes' last book, Why They Kill. Here Rhodes investigates the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the teams of killers in Hitler's Germany who would begin the slaughters that would become the Holocaust. When most of us think of the Holocaust, we think of death camps like Auschwitz, the gas chambers and crematoria. What most people forget is that the earliest killings were done by groups of SS-Einsatzgruppen in the field. Literally millions of people were simply murdered through beatings, firing squads and other "basic" methods long before the construction of the first death camps. It was the effect of this "face-to-face" slaughter on the morale and morals of the men who carried it out that would lead to the more industrial, impersonal methods of the death camps in later years. Rhodes reminds of something very important in this book: yes, the Holocaust was a horrible thing but it was conducted by human beings, not monsters. The Holocaust did not just suddenly appear as a particularly horrible idea. The development of the Holocaust was a process that can be traced and, possibly, understood. And Rhodes makes an excellent stab at trying to understand what happened. In the process, he examines the psychology of people like Heinrich Himmler and many of the other people who attempted to carry out the Final Solution. Plus, he gives a fresh look at an important part of history that gets swamped in our knowledge of the Holocaust. It is well worth the read.

This book covers the Einsatzgruppen and their atrocities. It is a mind numbing amount of murder. I found it very interesting and filled with facts. These murderers were responsible for nearly a third of killing, mostly done with bullets. And it's important to understand their part in the holocaust This is important book as part of a larger group of books that can provide a greater understanding of the holocaust.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to drill down into the details of the Holocaust by bullets on the Eastern Front in WW2. Rhodes does a great job of describing these horrible and sometimes fascinating events through the eyes the victims and the perpetrators. I am a WW2 history buff, and have been for a long time, but there was a great deal of information in this book that I was unaware of, it gets slow in a few places, but overall I was very pleased with the book.

Well documented history of the SS murder detachments, combined with an illuminating analysis of the nature of such violence. This book was a challenging read due to its subject. It could not help but horrify. Yet I was glad to finish it because it is such an unknown history that underlies much of the war in the East. We know it was a brutal, titanic stuggle, but to come to grips with that reality is truly difficult.

Richard Rhodes has further solidified himself as one of my favorite authors with his work "Masters of Death." After reading is world-reknowned "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," I was eager to read more of his work. As a student of the Holocaust and World War II, I knew the book would be incredibly powerful and informative. The book looks not only at the historical aspects of the Nazi-created genocide and killing machine of the 1940's but looks at the "human element" involved in undertaking such a brutal, cruel and inhumane operation. He delves into how the Nazi's looked to lessen the impact of the mass killings on those who committed them and protect the sanity of German soldiers. A thorough, well-researched, often horrific book because it explains how the Holocaust, supposedly initiated by monsters, was entirely too human. Thank you, Richard Rhodes, for giving readers another masterpiece of history.

Tremendously well researched and reasoned analysis of the Einsatzgruppen during WW2. Warning this is an unpleasant subject that I could only read for about an hour at a time. Himmler and Heydrich were monsters of a sort that we might never see again. I especially liked the way Rhodes couches the development of the killers malefic behavior in a bona fide framework - Lonnie Athens stages of violent development. Great book.

Not an easy book to get through because it goes into great detail about the gory insanity of the einsatzgruppen operations, Rhodes is a great writer and the narrative flows very easily and freely. The book includes many unforgettable, indelible images and takes an interesting tack in taking a stab at psychological analysis to explain the unexplainable. I like the discussions on psychology/psychiatry- they are long enough to be substantive, but not too unfathomable. The main problem with the book is that it seems to come to a very sudden end. Its as if all of the filth & evil which the author had to spew out on the pages as part of his work drove him to the point where he could just not write any further. Also, thanks for the epilogue, where we see how many of these guys actually got away with what they did.

Rhodes is an excellent author and this is a compelling topic. It covers many of the atrocious parts of the SS and its killing machine. However, it reads like a Government report and does not have the flow I had expected in Rhodes. Overall it is exceptional, however it could have been more compelling is made to flow better.

This exhaustive chronicle of the history of the Einsatzgruppen is the most detailed, gruesome account of the holocaust I've ever read, and I have read a lot of books on the subject of Nazi barbarity and cruelty. The book is packed with sickening details of exactly what the Einsatzgruppen did in specific areas, with accounts of the horrific things they did that even the well-versed reader will find shocking, such as the execution of thousands of babies and children. Rhodes also writes interestingly about sociological research that attempts to explain the appalling brutality of the men who committed these atrocities. A short, two-chapter synopsis of Himmler's career provides some welcome relief from the relentless descriptions of blood, gore, and horrendous suffering. Rhode also briefly attempts to refute the thesis of "Ordinary Men." Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" is similarly, if briefly challenged. For those who want to know the whole story of the murderous acts of the Nazi regime, including the fact that the execution of the Jews comprised only about 1/3 of the unarmed people the Nazis killed, and the fact that only 1/2 of the Jews murdered by the Nazis were killed in the gas chambers, this is the book to read. My greatest criticism of the book is the fact that it is a bit disjointed and confusing - the horrors that took place in Lithuania, for example, are related at the beginning of the book and then about halfway through more accounts of killings in Lithuania are examined. Anyone who believes that it was strictly Germans who perpetrated these horrible crimes is certainly in for a rude awakening. The brutality of life in Eastern Europe and Western Russia during this period is dreadful indeed to contemplate.

Richard Rhodes quite rightfully was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his earlier The Making of the Atomic Bomb. In Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, however, he does not match the form that made that earlier work intensely engrossing. Rhodes covers the development of the SS-Einsatzgruppen (the successor to the SA) and the subsequent deployment of the SS to deal with "the Jewish question", particularly focusing on the actions on the Eastern Front as Germany rolled into Russia. While the initial brainstorming of the group and the replacement of the SA brownshirts with the SS under Himmler and Heydrich is interesting, the remainder is a bit disjointed and ultimately not quite as interesting: Rhodes skips from place to place, gives figures more than anything else for the deportation of the Western Jewry to points east, and spends quite a long time trying to analyze the "violent socialization" of the members of the SS - both "malefic" and "malefication" are used much too often to describe men who willingly (or enthusiastically) completed their assigned tasks of murdering those not fitting Hitler's ideal Reich. True though it may be (and the inclusion of examples of killing methods and photographs of those about to meet their end could move one to understand the viewpoint presented) it moves the work more to a sociological commentary on the nature of violence that happens to use a large scale, horrifying event as the backdrop rather than a true study of the "invention" of the Holocaust and the logistics and planning that made it possible. Overall, it is a worthy read. However, it does not stand atop other works that examine the SS and the involvement of the SS in the Holocaust.

The book is very factual, which is big PLUS.And its help me understand the mindset of humanity. The only drawback of the book is to me it was too wordy.

I thought the book was very good in describing the initial pieces of the "final solution." Most people think of the holocaust as the gas chambers exclusively. The book goes into incredible detail on the initial firing squads, etc. I thought one important and interesting part of the book was how the author describes that only 1/3 of the holocaust victims were Jews. The rest were Catholic Poles, Russians, Slavs, etc. We usually think of the Holocaust as just Jews. The only part of the book I didn't like was all the psychological profiling stuff. For 40 pages the author tried to explain "why" the Nazi's did what they did..I don't know if that will ever be answered!

A good book on the atrocities committed by the SS-Einsatzgruppen. Most people are educated on the German Regular Army, the SS-Waffen, and the SS run concentraion camps during the Holocaust but most are not well educated on the dealers of death, the SS-Einsatzgruppen. The formation, the structural organization of the units, and the beginning of their ride of terror and death into Eastern Europe to include Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and the Ukraine. A very well written and powerful book about the original Masters of Death.

A tough read for several reasons, not the least of which being the atrocities committed. It was more of an academic study whereas I wanted a more personal-interest story.

It's a little known fact that more than 1.5 million Jews were murdered by Hitler's roaming death squads before the Nazi's started using extermination camps like Treblina or Sobibor to murder en masse even more efficiently. 1.5 million killed by the bullet, by beatin or any other disgusting method they found. this book will disturb you, you Will lose sleep as you read it but it's a critical reading to understand the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazis

Well written indictment of the german people for what they did in 'The Bloodlands'. German soliders that refused to shoot jews were not punished disspelling the myth that 'They were just following orders' the sad fact was that these men were volunteers and then driven insane or to alcohol for their actions. Too horrific to be read all at once.

Very detailed account of the killing squads in the Ukraine during WWII. It is difficult to take in all this information - it is too shocking. I knew some of these stories from other books, but this is in more detail with individual listing of cities and statistics. Good reference book. The reason I gave this four stars is because the subject is almost too terrible to contemplate. The book is very well written and documented.

It's a given that Holocaust reading is uncomfortable at best. But there is the good, the bad and the ugly, as in any category of storytelling. Rhodes is amongst the most brilliant of writers of non fiction. I've read his Making of the Atomic Bombs and Arsenals of Folly, as well as this book. He simply has the talent and skill. But even Rhodes can get to the point where it affects him, and I believe it did get to him late in Masters of Death. There seems to be a rapid drop off of detail and rush to conclusion that could be explained by editorial demands or simple heart sickness. The tales he relates, unless you're a hard core, very well read connoisseur of the Holocaust, will leave you hollow and unable to comprehend what he's saying, at some points. It's utterly visceral, exploding skulls and screaming babies, pits of writhing bodies, blood frenzied mobs, ghastly experiments in quick, mass killings, and not very much in the way of human redemption. This is not a comprehensive story of the Holocaust, but as the title implies, a focusing upon the Einsatzgruppen, so don't expect to end up in Auschwitz amongst familiar territory. It's raw and it does not put the killing through any kind of filter to make it easier on the reader. What's most distressing, upon finishing the book, is that unlike any familiar text of history as you've known it, he does not take you to the end of the story, which in this case, is the end of the war. He ends the story with the dissolution of the Einsatzgruppen as they were fed into the anti partisan efforts on the Eastern Front. There is no justice done, for the reader. You're left on the train tracks leading to the destroyed crematoria of Treblinka, and there you remain. I would not recommend this to the casual reader who wants to know a bit about the Holocaust. This material is only for those who want to sink down into the killing pits.

I bought this because of the subject covered (especially after reading Browning's Ordinary Men and his other works on the final solution, as well as Goldhagen's controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners and a good few others on the topic) but mostly because of Rhodes' two stellar previous books on the development of atomic and hydrogen bombs. I think the previous reviews capture most of the strengths and weaknesses of the book; it is neither a truly comprehensive account of the grisly activities of the Einsatzgruppen nor what I thought was a really convincing application of the 'violent socialisation' theories of criminologist Lonnie Athens. I'm certainly not an expert on the latter but didn't feel some of the links or conclusions were conclusively demonstrated or proven in the book. Overall I thought it was a valuable, but not essential, addition to our understanding of the Nazi era, but with some flaws. I think Rhodes ability to tell a story well makes the book memorable even with these perceived flaws, but I think the definitive version of the Einsatzgruppen and their role in Eastern Europe remains to be written

This has been the most terrifying look I think I have ever had at the species called human beings. What so called normal people reared in a Christian Nation are capable of doing without compassion. There were places I had a hard time reading, I had to put the book aside for a while. Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes is like cutting something open to discover a cancer growing inside rotting everything decent and good. What is even worse is realizing that kind of evil isn't confined to the German nation, but it lurks in all of us humans. That is capable of roaring to the surface at any given moment if the right set of circumstances presents itself. You have always known it was there, but was never confronted with the vivid picture before. What is so frightening about it is these were normal men, much like your brother or your favorite uncle. One you would never suspect was capable of such cruelty against other humans. Some of the atrocities I have read about in other books before. And there have been movies in the past like the 'Holocaust' starring Meryl Streep and James Woods that gave me a brief look at that period in time. But, never anything quite so graphic in nature. There was things I had never heard about before. What the so called human race is capable of doing to other human's over such a innocent thing as having the wrong religion or the wrong race. But, unlike some people I do not delude myself that some supernatural being roams the earth. Unfortunately enough, cruelty is inherent to man. All one has to do is read history to know in some cases man has never advanced past the animal stage in evolution. What he is capable of is truly frightening. What's worse it's something that is present in all of us.

Six million is a number that will always be synonymous with the Holocaust. While it may shockingly convey the magnitude of loss, the figure somehow comes across as disturbingly clinical in the way it overshadows the multitude of hideous incidents that contributed to the final figure. Richard Rhodes' MASTERS OF DEATH shines a light on the gut-wrenching atrocities committed by roving bands of German Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe to facilitate the Nazi pursuit of Jewish-free Lebensraum. I found MASTERS OF DEATH to be a chilling and addictive read. Rhodes divides the book to two parts: "The War in the East" and "Seven Departments of Hell". The book's first part provides background information on Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi plan to expand east (from Poland) and how a culture of violence is established. If anything, the first part prepares readers for what is to come in the second part, when the killing is described in graphic detail. Rhodes gives readers some insight as to how Himmler's lust for violence was offset by his generally weak demeanor which ultimately led him to being a "desk murderer" who was adept at convincing others to murder because he couldn't do it himself (much like today's terrorist leaders). The second part of the book is simply ghastly. Rhodes spares no detail in describing the implementation of the Nazi extermination policy. The images drawn from those pages still remain vivid in my mind as I write this review. This part of the book accounts for the "early days" (prior to the death camps), when the Nazi's were significantly "less proficient" in their methods of killing mass groups of people. Starting with pogroms in conquered localities, the methods progressed to group shootings of Jewish men deemed to be "partisans" or "looters" (the Nazi excuse that was used to urge locals to participate in the bloodshed). When these actions do not deliver satisfactory numbers, Jews are lured en-masse under the promise of evacuation, only to face being lined-up before prepared pits and ravines. The exclusion of women and children no longer applied, nor did the barbarous manner in which they were murdered ... stripped of valuables/clothing, often forced to facilitate the digging of their own graves and fully aware of their fate as they witness others being murdered. Some of the killing squads even formulated their own unique/unconventional killing methods. This chapter reveals the shocking cruelty and disgusting immorality that fueled the Nazi quest for racial purity in their conquered territory. Rhodes frequently includes first-hand accounts of both perpetrators and victims. Throughout the book, I kept asking myself "how" and "why" so many men could willingly participate in such carnage. Rhodes early chapter on the cycle of violence echoes throughout the book as many men tried to rationalize their actions as "following orders", "not wanting to appear weak", being desensitized to the violence or admittedly brainwashed into believing that killing Jews was just. Surely, some struggled with their behavior (mostly when it involved killing elderly, sick, women and children), but their attempts to justify most always come across as pathetic and weak. One of the more disturbing aspects of the entire issue is that the vast majority of those participants who managed to survive the war anonymously slipped into post-war society without ever having to face consequences. For me, MASTERS OF DEATH eliminates any degree of sympathy when elderly men are brought forth to face charges of actions they committed in their formative years against the unarmed, weak and defenseless; it is hard not to appreciate the justice ... and the irony. While the horrors of Germany's concentration camps and death camps have been well-chronicled for over half a century in film and print, the actions of Himmler's designated "killing squads" has been largely ignored by comparison. MASTERS OF DEATH provides a succinct analysis of both the planning and implementation of the Nazi's goal to exterminate the Jews in Europe and offers an explanation as to how so many individuals willingly and mercilessly followed orders that demanded the mass killing of innocents ... including the sick, the elderly ... and children. I believe this book is truly an asset to those wanting to delve deeper in understanding the absolute vicious nature of the Nazi's non-military behavior in the East.

After reading this book it gives the reader an understanding of action these unit committed. In great details this book follows the units and what they did right up to the end of the war. After reading I was aware that a special school was setup before these units went to the field to indoctranate them into what they were suppose to do

For a person looking to research the enigma of the SS, then this is one title you cannot ignore. Its a rather disturbing account of Einsatzgruppen activities. But for the sake of history, the author sets out to shine light into this fanatical sect of the Waffen SS. You will be surprised how all walks of life (from rich to poor) joined the actions. Set back and let your mind be blown.

'Masters of Death' is a scholarly, very important book and doesn't deserve its garish, B-movie cover. Richard Rhodes may not explain why the holocaust happened but he certainly deserves an A+ for explaining how it happened. 'Masters of Death' deserves to be at the top of the NRA's 'Highly Recommended' list.

A sober account that investigates why and how `normal' men were willing to carry out orders that included the widespread and routine slaughter of innocents. How could they live with themselves? The author's `Why They Kill' (an examination of capital crime behavior) may also be of interest. Other sources: Browning (Ordinary Men), Sereny (Into That Darkness), Hoess (Commandant of Auschwitz), Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews), etc. A vital work but beware: the contents are grizzly.

This is a difficult book to read as it delves into the mass murder, torture, & horrible deprivations that occurred across Europe during WWII. The number of people wiped out, entire towns & villages, is mind-boggling. Richard Rhodes has written a masterfully researched book about the wing of the Army who mostly committed these crimes. Unforgettable.

This was a really good, detailed account of the Einsatzgruppen's destruction of the Eastern Jewish population. I liked how instead of just giving accounts of what happened, Rhodes looked at the psychology of the perpetrators. I think many people ask "How could people do that to each other?" when reading about the Holocaust. Rhodes attempts to explain the psychology behind the mass murderers. I found this very thorough without being too dense and detailed. I read Saul Friedlander's The Extermination Years, which was too dense and almost unfocused - making it hard to read. This book was very organized and focused

For anyone interested in this era, this has to be one of the best books available. The work of the Einsatzgruppen is not well known, but was far more brutal and shocking than the atrocities that occurred in the better known and subsequent concentration camps. Makes you wonder about our civilization, and how close we truly are to the animal kingdom. Incredible events that happened during the lives of our own grandparents, yet so many are forgotten already..

Rhodes gives a very clear picture of the SS.

Masters of Death is perhaps one of the most unsettling books on Nazi activities before and during WW 2. It focuses on HimmlersSS-Einsatzgrupopen force formed prior to the concentration camps to deal with the Final Soultion. Although the ending was disappointing ,the book was hard to put down ,and shows how these monsters were allowed to murder ,Jews ,Russians ,Czechs and people from all Europe,including the children,elderly and handicapped. The three H's Hitler,Himmler,and Heydrich were destroying generations of people's ,in the cruelest inhuman ways imaginable. If you have a weak stomach ( as these three demons ) don't read this book . Rhodes has incidents and documents that show us what really happened, and how these men actually believed they weren't comitting the most heinous crimes that Humanity has known. The cowards of Nazi Germany and all the European countries including the residents of these countries hopefully are paying the price in their death.

I gave this book 5-stars not because I loved it, but because it shook me to my core. This is a must read for any historian and is a chilling reminder of just how barbaric the Holocause was with regards to human decency and degradation. This book will take you to the lowest depths of humanity.

Rhodes' confronting book, with its extensive descriptions of wartime atrocities, is heavily dependent on secondary sources (carefully acknowledged). But while it does not traverse much new ground, as a succinct and well-narrated account of the operations of SS "special forces" in Eastern Europe, it's a valuable contribution to the literature. One disappointment is the failure of the book to substantiate the claim made in one of the dust-cover reviews, that it provides substantial coverage of both Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the mass murderers. The non-Jewish aspect is only touched on; as though that "advance reviewer" saw a manuscript that's been cut before publishing.

Most people assume that the Nazis created their worst war crimes in the concentration camps, which this book tells the complete opposite side to all of the atrocities committed by Germany. Most of the worse crimes predate the era of the concentration camps. I have already read the book twice and intend on reading it again.

great book very fast service

Rhodes is a great writer dark son a book he wrote on the development of the hydrogen bomb is another of his geat books see all of his books at amazon they are great great great great one cent for hardcover cant be beat

I found this book extremely well written and detailed, but it was very tough to get through due to the never-ending accounts of mass murder. There is only so much description of shootings of women and small children that I can handle. Not to mention the 'efficient' way in which the Germans went about the Final Solution - particularly the 'sardine packing' method of mass killing. I won't be reading anymore holocaust books for a while as this one just about gave me nightmares. Who needs fiction when modern history can provide more that enough horror stories to turn even the hardest stomach. I would highly recommend this book to anyone seeking a no BS account of the Einsatzgruppen and their horrific work.

It happened.

Althought ten years old, the book is done with typical Rhodes thouroghness in accuracy and sickening detail. This seminal work, along with Treblinka, should be mandatory reading for all high school students, especially for millenials. I will always assume that there is fundimentally something horrendously amiss with the German psyche.

Direct historical account of the inhumane atrocities of a self proclaimed superior race, faces of death and murder without conscience. Hard to fathom the mindset in killing so many men, women and children. A must read as it is a historical fact of the darkness people face when the twisted minds of power put aside humanity in the act of war

Chilling and superbly neutral survey at the same time. Though I have read about this issue quite a lot before there was still something new to emerge. I recommend definitely (but not for those who detest narratives with graphic details).

Rhodes paints a masterful portrait of Hitler's Einsatzgruppen - the death squads that accompanied the Wehrmacht. Perhaps the best chapter concerned how the common man can be turned into a monster. Excellent book, however it is grim throughout.

Fast shipping. Arrived in excellent condition. Details the workings of Germany's elite killing units in Russia against Jews. Normal young men were trained to become vicious killers. Leaders were professional men. These killing units decimated several million Jewish men, women and children. Chills you right to the bone.

I am very well versed and well read about the Holocaust but reading this book was exceptionally painful, forcing me to stop after every few pages to take a deep breath. This book is a continuous nightmare. No one will ever be able to fully understand the depth of depravity exhibited by the monsters that constituted the Einstzgruppen and other Nazi units partaking in the Holocaust. My only thought regarding those monsters is my hope that the vast majority of them suffered painful and long lingering deaths during the war - please let that be so.

This is a very hard book to read, since the nazi's atrocities are far worst than what we see in Hollywood movies like Schindlers List or The Pianist. I was amazed to learn how the final solution evolved within the nazi system and was so easy to happen. A lesson that we all should learn.

a well written rendition of a horrible time in history and it's notorious, evil participants!

Do not read this book if you have a weak stomach. This book describes the activities of the Einstazcommandos in Russia, Poland and the Baltics. It's a description of the Holocaust before it was called the "final solution" after the Wansee conference. We all know Auschwitz and the other camps of death but here is, before that, the real beginning.

Comprehensive narrative about every detail of Hitler's Final Solution. Brutally honest and disturbing! Not for the feint of heart.

Insightful examination of the character and motives of the most depraved people the world has seen. Provides details directly from the murderers trials and journals.

good summary of events but there are only so many ways you can describe the horrors of the holocost

A decent history, but common ground covered by many others.

Well written, well researched and very descriptive at times of how Himmler's SS went about killing the Jews of Eastern Europe. Chapter 2 was well placed to discuss what brings people to violence.

Great book. A must read for anyone interested in a terrible moment in European history. Learned a lot. Highly recommended

Good Stuff Thanks !

Being a student of the Holocaust with a personal connection (having lost relatives in the camps), I found this a scholarly, detailed account that is also well written. Very enlightening.

A must if you are to understand their people behavior, then and now

Excellent overview of these "iron brooms" of the Nazi's. Difficult to read at times due to the nature of the subject matter, but Rhodes does a superb job explaining how seemingly 'ordinary' soldiers could degenerate into the brutality that characterized the Einsatzgruppen.

Outstanding insights into the history leading up to the death camps. Not a easy read buy very detailed as it goes through the history that is little known--the camps were of course horrible, but these events need to be more widely known to fully understand the history.

The expression "I like it " is not applicable seen the subject. I remember the people on he streets in 1942 ( I was 5 years old) and ask my grandparend about the yellow stars on their coats and they said they are Joden (Jews). Those days she did not know what should happen to them . Now we do. I red the books written by Phillip Kerr and this book was one of his sources of his knowledge. Dutch situation was bad during he war but not as bad described in the book, holland lost many of his jews.

As a History major, this was very well presented.

Portrays chronological terrorizing events of premeditated nazi massacres throughout their mass invasion of small towns throughout Europe before the use of camps and ovens.

difficult to read due to horrendous treatment of jews....but necessary to read so that we never condone this again.

Good study of the SS-Einsatzgruppen and an attempt to explain how it happened.

A good, concise history of the Einsatzgruppen and their reign of terror in Occupied Europe during WWII. I would recommend this to anyone who is a serious student of the Holocaust.

Many seem to overlook the Einsatzgruppen and the role they played in the final solution. But warning, this book is very detailed about the specific acts of brutality. I had to put it down about halfway through and take a rest. Extremely sad and horrific. Steel yourself before you read it.

Good book, but very detailed. Was a little hard to get into, but as I read on I understood the beginning more.

Page after page, you read about these savages who took part in an orgy of violence not seen in the annals of history. Very engrossing.

Everyone should learn as much as they can about this period in history. Richard Rhodes is detailed and precise. It is gut wrenching. It's hard to wrap your mind around the fact that this actually happened. Knowledge is power.

Excellent book backed by extensive research.

A fascinating, absolutely horrifying look at the development of the SS. Hard to put down, but hard to read in large doses.

Have read many books on the subject. This one is a very hard read. Wouldn't recommend it.

"Masters of Death" Was a unique and chilling accounting of the German Einsatzgruppen (death squads) during WWII. Though discriptive and a mind-jarring tale, it is honest and straight-foreward. This was a horrible time in human history and nature. It is shocking to say the least and should be read by everyone. We should learn from history even if it is a horrible history.........penny

Absolutly chilling is how i would describe it. I dont like the authors sneering hostility towards german leaders however. Great read

A fine retelling of the horrific crimes of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front. I would say there are two faults with the book: the whole thing seems fairly compressed, which doesn't lead to an easily followed narrative. Anecdotes were hard to place in the overall timeline of the war. Second, Rhodes does a lot of armchair psychological analysis, which severely detracted from his subject matter. It's not that I fully disbelieve his conclusions--rather, he spends too little time pursuing his reasoning and buttressing his argument for me to fully embrace them. Otherwise, an incredible, harrowing story.

Extremely historical about who hitler was as a child and why he hated the Jews boy was he deranged he nevr killed anyone he had his army do all the slaying sick

A great history of Hitler's death squads that is validated by a significant number of testimony excerpts from Nuremberg and other trials. Not for the squeamish. The book can challenge any reader's confidence in the moral center of humanity.

Very good read. Rhodes did his usual excellent job. Well researched. Not for the faint of heart, graphic details. Highly recommended.

A thorough and consise history with intetesting psychological assessment of those involved

Not for everyone.

a look into a society gone mad

Very interesting stuff , horribly grotesque , but very interesting non the less.

excellent service and as represented

very detailed and thorough. Everything you could possibly want to know about the SS. reminds me of "The Bloodlands" by T Snyder.

The narrative of events presented in this book is both accurate and compelling and there can be little criticism leveled at the historical accuracy of the work itself. However, I found the psychological/philosophical analysis of the perpetrators to be not quite up to the task. Rhodes is almost obsessed with trying to fit Himmler and various other SS einsatzgruppen officers into the process of violent socialization developed by Lonnie Athens. He places so much faith in this formula of violent socialization that he ignores the simple truth that there is in every human person the capacity to inflict great and terrible evils upon our fellow man. The better philosophical analysis would have shown how "violent socialization" brings out the evil in man but Rhodes' analysis instead implies that "violent socialization" introduces evil to man, as if he was innocent prior to his "violent socialization". In denying the fact that the capacity for evil resides in every man Rhodes effectively hamstrings his own attempts to analyse how men could ever bring themselves to commit such terrible acts of cruelty.

While I was reading the book my heart ached for all of the Jews that were killed just because they were Jewish. Hitler and his army were so evil. I cannot even imagine all of the pain and suffering their "victims" endured. There was no empathy or compassion , just plain slaughtering of so many innocent lives. It was very well written, the title Masters of Death was very appropriate.

Good information, but IMHO, opinionated and one sided. I would discuss more from both sides. There is always another view.

sad

My purpose in reading the book was to learn more about this lesser known segment of Hitler's war machine, and there was some good information. However, by chapter two the book became a dissertation on violence departing from the subject matter completely, and rambled on citing various sociologists and their studies on violence. I put the book down. Not what I was looking for.

The book contains no new information on this topic, but does include too much emotional speculation on the main characters and reasoning behind the savagery. The theories in this book can be now applied to Israel in their lebonsborn mentality toward Palestine.

Book arrived in excellant condition.It is sad to think people could have beeen so cruel.These Islamic jihadists of today are getting pretty close.They must be defeated.

much technical history.

First the positive -- this book is a very readable collection of testimonies and eyewitness accounts of certain Einsatzgruppen actions, particularly actions in the Baltic and at Babi Yar. While little is original in this book, and it's got problems that I go into below, it concentrates material that will be useful to readers who do not know much about this domain of the Holocaust. As with most books on this subject, there are parts with nauseating cruelty, and with heartbreaking tragedy. This makes the book memorable and affecting, but this is primarily because of its subject rather than its quality. Now the negatives: 1) The book is a rambling stream of consciousness with long, inexplicable, and at times sudden digressions. He seems to be trying to tie the Einsatzgruppen activities with the overall arc of the Holocaust, but he does this in an extraordinarily cumbersome way. It is not news that the wholesale, systematic extermination of the Jews (at least as a local / regional policy) began in the Soviet Union in 1941, and only secondarily became policy for Polish Jews and Jews from elsewhere in occupied Europe. This is absolutely basic Holocaust history. Rhodes would have been better served to just give an organized history of the Einsatzgruppen, then in an afterward show how integral this was to the systemic radicalization of Jewish policy by the SS. 2) There are absolutely puzzling errors. The most egregious is that Rhodes credits Odilo Globocnik with creating Chelmno (which he describes as east of Lublin). Just doing a Wikipedia search for Chelmno will discredit this statement. Chelmno was the product primarily of Greiser (administrator of the Warthegau), Koppe (higher SS / police leader of the Warthegau), and Lange (a thug who exported the euthanasia program to Poland), and not only was Chelmno west of Lublin but it was west of the entire Generalgovernment where Globocnik operated. It was under an entirely different political and police administration. At any rate, the value of discussing Chelmno is that simultaneously in late 1941, there were Einsatzgruppen murders in the occupied USSR, plans to build Belzec to kill the Generalgovernment Jews, plans to build Chelmno to kill the Warthegau Jews, and these were mechanisms to kill LOCAL Jews so that there would be empty ghettos in which they could deport German, Austrian, and Czech Jews. This is how the local extermination policy was created -- to accomodate the expulsion policy at the heart of the Reich. Another error is Rhodes' hyperbolic contention that Babi Yar was the largest Nazi mass grave with ~ 125,000 victims. Not quite. Virtually all of Belzec's nearly 500,000 victims were buried in pits on site before they were exhumed and burned. At least 300,000 victims of Treblinka had been buried before cremation became policy there. There were similar of victims numbers in mass graves at Maly Trostinets and at Auschwitz (Hoess estimated 106-107,000 before the four large "Crema" were built). Rhodes also claims he has presented the only known example of the SS killing victims in a pit filled with activated quicklime. This is also not true -- it is known that Herbert Lange tried this at Chelmno. 3) It's not clear that Rhodes has done any actual research for this book. It's more like he's done a big book report. He quotes liberally from other historians. It makes one think that the source material he cites wasn't discovered by going and reading source material -- it's just from repeating and re-citing the original material that other historians have published before. This is sloppy, which makes it all the more bizarre that towards the beginning of his book he decides to unleash an unbridled critique of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (of "Hitler's Willing Executioners"). Yeah yeah, he's the guy everyone loves to hate. But Yehuda Bauer and Christopher Browning have legs to stand on -- towering legs of academic achievement -- when they critique Goldhagen. Rhodes doesn't get to pick and choose his favorite historian if all he's giving us is a derivative. 4) Rhodes is pretty much unsuccessful at promoting a thesis about violent socialization. This is commented on in other reviews here. He calls this "evidence-based", even though the violent offenders who produced this thesis were violent criminals and not members of the Nazi regime (or anything like it). So this may be evidence-based for the population studied, but anyone who has ever done a college or graduate-level journal club knows that generalizability is not automatic. He gives a rambling biography of Hitler and tries to make the case that Hitler had been violently socialized. As if having a rigid father and surviving the WWI western front was somehow sufficient to explain Hitler? Hardly -- sure, it sounds like he was violently socialized -- but Hitler was an armchair murderer who was driven by 1) extraordinary hatred, and 2) a philosophical contempt (that he admitted himself) for societal prohibitions against killing. There were a lot of people like Hitler who survived violent trauma. Next, Rhodes goes on to give a biography of Himmler. Himmler had NOTHING resembling violent socialization in his past, though Rhodes strains and creaks to make it seem so. Himmler's most violent experience was carrying a flag during the failed putsch. Himmler was a savant-like wannabe who, like Hitler, was driven by hatred, power, and somehow an inability to empathize. Peter Longerich, in his biography of Himmler (and in his overall account of the Holocaust), makes a strong case that Himmler individually radicalized the SS to wholesale genocide in Russia for a specific reason: to gain individual control over occupation / racial policy in the East, and to wrest it away from Rosenberg. It's the most horrible, cynical kind of politicking, but those were the tools in Himmler's arsenal. He had already done it with his concentration camp system, and wrested the whole German police state from his rivals. He did it again in the occupied territories by appealing to Hitler's penchant for blood. Rhodes does not go on to give biographies of other key actors in the Einsatzgruppen, most notably Heydrich who basically created the Einsatzgruppen. Was Heydrich violently socialized? No, he was an upper class wimpy son of an accomplished musician, and he couldn't cut it in the peacetime navy. Many of the Einsatzgruppen leaders had spent more time in graduate school than in street battles (let alone trenches). So it seems that the violent socialization thesis just doesn't fit well. A common denominator within the perpetrators -- at least those at an administrative level -- is a commonality of ideology, a certain degree of mediocrity striving for power, and then a general culture of death that validated individual acts of violence. At a lower, more operational level, people became violent on the job if they could handle it; others (like Dirlewanger and Wirth and Goethe and Moll, etc) were just outright criminal sadists from the start. But this is all superficial observation. If we are to delve deeper, and we are to accept that very little in history is similar to the Nazis and their regime, then why are we taking an unrelated study of an unrelated population to somehow account for them? Rhodes would have done better to stick to investigations of the perpetrators themselves. Rhodes handles the subject of perpetrator brutality very awkwardly. He gives plenty of anecdotes of sadism, brutality, and emotional and physical torture of victims. He interweaves this with postwar claims by perpetrators that they advocated professional "military-style" execution and by statements from Himmler to suggest that he would not countenance wanton brutality. At the same time, if the question that perplexes Rhodes is how can people commit genocide, the brutalization of victims is almost necessary to this development. The most insightful, perspicacious statement about this came from Franz Stangl, who served as commandant of both Treblinka and Sobibor, in his interviews with Gitta Sereny. She asked why he permitted the torture and brutality at Treblinka. He responded to the effect that the brutalization was the only way the SS could carry out the task of genocide. Between flogging and beating and treating the victims like beasts, and forcing them to strip naked the SS and their collaborators fired up their own rage and callousness and transformed the victims from humans into a mass of animals. (Parenthetically, the removal of clothing was important to the dehumanization. Stangl had difficulty looking at the victims when clothed, and could not watch them undressing -- but once they were naked they were like sheep going to the slaughter). So inasmuch as Himmler was an idealist, he KNEW how much torture was going on. At the Einsatzgruppen sites, in the ghettos, in the extermination camps, in the concentration camps. He was the mastermind of the Nazi terror state -- and you can't inflict terror unless you terrorize. So in the end, there are FAR better references for people interested in learning about the Einsatzgruppen and its role in the Holocaust: For the world's most exhaustive (and depressing) catalog of interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Einsatzgruppen, read "The Black Book" by Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg. For page after page of accounts by perpretrators, read "The Good Old Days" by Ernst Klee. For a comprehensive account of the mechanics of the Nazi genocide, including the Einsatzgruppen (in MUCH more detail -- albeit sterile -- than Rhodes), see "Holocaust" by Peter Longerich. This, in my opinion, is the best book to take the two "sparkplugs" of the Holocaust -- the euthanasia program and the Einsatzgruppen program (starting from their activities in Poland), and shows how they eventually merged into a comprehensive extermination policy. For more detail about the Holocaust in the Ukraine, see the book by Wendy Lower. And for the best all around account of the Holocaust, see "The Years of Extermination" by Saul Friedlander.

Historically an interesting book, but not very easy reading. Very hard to understand that these things happened in our time.

Disappointed that I could not lend this kindle book. Why Not allow the lending of the book? If I had bought the paper copy I could have allowed friends to read it.

Starting to read this book, but due to it's cruel content I just could not finish it...

The is a blunt but important examination of the start of The Holocaust. On the heels of invasion, mass murders were perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen or special task forces. The Einsatzgruppen were involved in the murder of much of the intelligentsia, including members of the priesthood, and cultural elite of Poland, and played an integral role in the implementation of the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". These roaming paramilitary groups were organized by Himmler and Heydrich before "the gruesome death camps industrialized the Final Solution." Rhodes has done his research. He has combed through postwar memoirs and interrogations. Not to mention the fact, the Nazis implicated themselves by being such anal record keepers. Were these Einsatzgruppen men fanatical monsters? Not in this account. Many of the lower ranks were so impacted by their actions that Himmler set up mental hospitals and rest camps for these men. More than one million were killed by gun and buried by these men. The leaders were highly educated. Nine of seventeen leaders of Einsatzgruppe A held doctorate degrees. They would have known what exactly what they were doing. Precious few were punished after the war as both American and German courts were shockingly lenient. This is an important contribution to history but is a very difficult read for obvious reasons.

Anyone who considers themselves a Holocaust historian--or anyone who enjoys reading of the Holocaust for knowledge and remembrance's sake--needs to pick up this book at some point in their life. This book is both easy to read yet nearly unbearable to get through. Rhodes makes a clear argument of how the Einsatzgruppen were able to kill as many people as they did--using Lonnie Athens' theory of violent-socialization--through mass shootings and other executions. He draws from a historical record comprising of Nazi documentation from pre-, during, and post-World War II, perpetrator confessions, and survivor testimonies that have largely been unexplored in Holocaust historiography. It is these quoted accounts that make the book so hard to read due to their stark imagery of violence, cruelty, and brutality--words that are, honestly, not strange or new terms attributed to the Holocaust. It is exactly for these reasons that this book should be read thoroughly by any reader who can handle it--and I urge you to at least try even if you think you cannot. The book especially explores Reinhard Heydrich (the head of the Reich Security Main Office and the second most powerful man in the SS)'s psyche as well as that of Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, particularly noting the fact that, for two men who ordered the deaths of millions of people, they never killed any of these people themselves. As a result, the psychological damage endured by Einsatzgruppen leaders and soldiers are also explored here, such damage taking place only a verification of how wrong killing these people were--and how aware they were of that fact, as well. So, yes, give it a read, and be prepared to think on the text long after you've turned the final, grueling page.

Sorry if my English is horrible. Masters of Death is a very "difficult" book to read. When I say difficult, I mean the content will shock you. This book doesn't deal with the general history of the Holocaust. The book centers on the dreaded SS-Einzatsgruppen, a medium-sized military unit formed by Himmler and Heydrich, that followed the Wehrmacht as it occupied Eastern European territories. The SS-Einzatsgruppen mission was to "relocate" Jews to other regions to clear the way for ethnic Germans and Reich Germans to move in to the occupied territories. After each territory was conquered by the Wehrmacht, the Einzatsgruppen followed behind by implementing their "relocation" program. The word "relocate" was used extensively by the Einzatsgruppen to actually mean "exterminate". This book describes in detail those who actually conducted the mass exterminations before the concentration camps were built. This book describes how the early extermination programs were formulated, executed, and then developed by the Einzatsgruppen to pave the way to introduce the concept of concentration camps. You won't read about Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Dachau in this book. Instead, you'll be reading the extermination programs conducted by the Einzastgruppen in places you probably never heard of like Kaunas, Lithuania. You'll find some familiar names in this book like Himmler and Hitler, but most of the names you will find here are probably names you've never heard of but are responsible for thousands upon thousands of murdered Jews and other ethnic races within the occupied regions of Eastern Europe. Most names are German, some Lithuanian, and some are Ukrainians. I would assume a lot of people thought that only the Germans did all the killing but as you read this book, there were hundreds of Eastern European collaborators who conducted and even devised brutal ways of extermination. You will read about Himmler and how incapable he was to pull the trigger on a victim, and even felt nauseated after witnessing an actual mass extermination, but didn't have any problems ordering mass exterminations. He was truly evil and twisted. You will find out how the idea of gassing first came about. Yes it came from the Einzatsgruppen. Einzatzgruppen devised all the methods of killing that was then implemented on a larger scale through concentration camps. Gassing didn't really start with the infamous Zyklon B. Gassing was first tested by the Einzatzgruppen using carbon monoxide pumped by mobile trucks with extended tail pipes. People were herded into small rooms and warehouses, and a truck fitted with a special pipe was then inserted through a window hole. The gassing took hours and it led to very horrible results that made the "cleaning up" process difficult. Yes, the methods devised by the Einzatsgruppen were made to make the extermination effective, efficient, and manageable to the killers. In one part of this book, you will read the concept of "Sardine Packing", devised and implemented by a commander of an Einzatzgruppen unit, that was then implemented to other killing areas. Sardine packing was used to describe an extermination method where men, women, children, and infants (yes including babies) were asked to lie facedown in a deep pit and then units of the Einzatsgruppen would then shoot them at the back of their heads. The "shooting" in the back of the head was for the benefit of the killers who didn't have to look at their victim's faces when they murdered them. This approach made the killing more "manageable" to the shooter. Once the first layer of people were killed in the pit, another layer of victims were asked to lie facedown on top of the first layer of corpses, and then the units would then shoot the second layer, then a third layer was brought in, until a huge stack of corpses filled the pit. This is one example of the brutality, the evilness, the monstrous act that the Einzatzgruppen and the whole evil Nazi war machine did to people. The most frightening aspect of it all were the methods devised by the Einzatsgruppen on how to effectively exterminate children and infants. Brutal, absolutely EVIL. I was just shocked. Children were shot and burned routinely. Infants were lifted off the ground by their arm and were shot. According to the Einzatzgruppen, this method of lifting infants by the arm and shot was to prevent the bullets from richochetting (sp?), instead of being shot while the infant was on the ground. Again, this method was for the benefit of the shooter. There are hundreds of incidents that you will read in this book. This book was well-written. I highly recommend it. I don't think I will read this book again because it is very heart-wrenching. I actually cried after I read how children were being killed day after day after day. Sometimes, the killing would start early morning and end late afternoon. Afterwhich, the killers were rewarded with vodka and a dinner feast. The dinner feast had a psychological "benefit" for the killers. It made them forget about what they just did so they could continue killing the next day. The book also centers on the conflict between the Einzatsgruppen and the Wehrmacht. On the one hand, the Wehrmacht were appalled and some even protested about the mass exterminations, but in the end the Wehrmacht remained silent and became witnesses to the slaughter. This doesn't excuse the Wehrmacht from the slaughter. Because they did not do anything to stop it, they became "willing" participants to these exterminations. The Wehrmacht were part of the extermination process too. You will read how professional German soldiers and officers at Babi Yar watched while the Einzatsgruppen herded people and shot them in killing pits. Read this book but be ready for the details. I agree with what the author said about these killers. He said that these killers were not monsters. These were human beings like you and me. These killers were everyday people you see on the street- the teacher, the lawyer, the government worker, the doctor. For us to categorize them as monsters is basically removing the possibility and responsibility that humans are incapable of such acts. In the end, the Joe Schmoe you see on the street, can be a very ruthless killer when the right buttons were pushed. Very frightening. You will be surprised that most of the ruthless Einzatsgruppen commanders were well-educated individuals. Some were doctors, some were professors who held dual PhDs, some were highly decorated police officers. When asked by the military tribunal, Filbert, an Einzatsgruppen commander, about why he did the killing, he replied "It was a Fuhrer Order. A Fuhrer order is always correct. As a soldier, one must always believe in the Fuhrer Order to be right." When asked if he felt the killing of children was wrong. He replied "No because the Fuhrer ordered it."

Reading this book is a traumatic experience. It's very well written, as are all of Richard Rhodes's books. I went through my "Rhodes phase" some years back, prior to when this book was published, but then Philip Kerr referenced it in his list of sources at the end of a recent Bernie Gunther novel. Amazingly, it was hard to get from the Chicago Public library system--they apparently only have a few copies, and the copy I ended up getting was in disgusting condition. I read it anyway because I felt I should, but my point is that it's a shame that such an important contribution to a dark chapter of history is off the radar for general readers. We are constantly making movies and setting novels in that era, yet this is an integral part of the picture and it's not well-known. Rhodes doesn't spend a lot of time discussing the death camps, although he does mention their locations and the methods of execution. This book's focus is the SS element in the Nazi war machine--how it developed, who ran it, how it operated, why it achieved such chilling success. He also includes heartbreaking photographs of the doomed, lining up to be murdered, some holding infants and toddlers, some looking directly into the camera. It's disturbing to see photos that look so contemporary, which is why these atrocities are so striking: this is still relatively recent history. Some of the issues Rhodes discusses include: --What type of person is capable of cold-blooded violence against innocent strangers? There is a certain personality type that can be "groomed" to perform these acts, but the balance between killing on a large scale and functioning in society is delicate. A person can't enjoy it too much, because that would make one a barbarian...these men were encouraged to think of themselves as cultured and sensitive heroes who, nonetheless, unflinchingly carried out a necessary duty. --What type of society allows this to happen? There is no doubt that a huge percentage of the population, not only of Germany but of Nazi-conquered countries, were aware that this was going on and actually collaborated with the SS. True, there were courageous individuals who helped victims escape, but there were also villagers who welcomed the Nazi invaders and participated in these massacres. There were also, of course, people who were forced to witness these events but who were either prisoners themselves or were in survival mode and couldn't do much to stop the carnage. Rhodes describes the horror of some of the Whermacht enlistees (regular German soldiers) who chanced upon mass killings and naively submitted reports to their superiors in an effort to have SS officers arrested--thinking that what they were seeing was a My Lai- type aberration. --Why didn't the Jews resist? Rhodes does list the other minorities that were in the gunsights of Hitler's henchmen, but the most sweeping efforts were specifically in response to Hitler's dream of a judenfrei (Jew-free)continent. Rhodes compares levels of civilization, where routine violence is endemic in the less-advanced cultures. European Jews, on the other hand, had for centuries resolved issues through discussion and negotiation, and even when they outnumbered gentiles did not resort to pograms. That extermination was going on was inconceivable to them on many levels. --Why were the Jews targeted? What was Hitler's problem with them? Why do Jews seem to be the object of so much hostility? This is a question I've thought about for years. I'm Roman Catholic by faith, and northern European by heritage, and it never ceases to amaze me how many well-educated, otherwise sensitive people readily accept Zionist conspiracy theories as cogent explanations for everything--including tsunamis ! Yet we Christians worship a Jew as the Son of God and lament His suffering on the cross. And we aspire to emulate the Apostles, also Jews. Amazingly, very few of the people who did all this killing ever stood trial. Few were convicted, fewer still sentenced, and most of those sentenced were released after short prison terms and rejoined their families. Rhodes also mentions a creepy little incident where the children of one high-ranking SS officer were guests in the home of another SS family and were shown some "keepsakes" : a book bound in human skin and other souvenirs. The adult child who recounted this was in a therapy group for family members of Nazis...the kid was seriously shaken by this event. How amazing that something so clearly horrific--something a child who is at the age of idolizing his parents, and who has presumably been brainwashed--scars the child but makes no impact on the adults aside from polite curiosity! Hitler's justifications are also bizarre. His "proof" that the Allied countries were all run by the Jews (Zionist conspiracies) was simply that they had joined forces against him. But his "proof" that the Allies secretly sympathized with his stance on the Jews was that they had refused to accept refugees marked for death (with the exceptions of Holland and Denmark). (Yet our "excuse" for turning away shiploads of people and for refusing to raise our immigrant quotas has been, "We didn't know what was really going on!" But we did. As did the "average" German, Lithuanian, Pole....) This book is hard to read, but I would recommend it to anyone who has any interest in the events surrounding World War II. If anyone doubts that Satan is prowling the Earth causing suffering and despair, this book will change your mind.

This book was written by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist/historian. It is very disturbing to read. Being a World War II history buff, I know this story to be true. However, the author makes estimates of the number of people murdered and overstates the amount. The actual killed in these actions was perhaps 1.5 million based on the works of others, but the author uses inferential information, such as bullets used, in his estimates overstate the number a bit. Other than that error, the book is a chilling and much needed history of the subject. Many people may not realize that the exterminations of Jews and others in Eastern Europe so Hitler could have "Living Space" started as mass executions. They recruited cold-blooded people who could do this, such as former prison inmates, and anyone else who would not excuse himself voluntarily. However, even those people could not handle the killings after awhile. The stories are very sad to hear. Picking up a child by the hair and shooting the child in the back of the head. Making prisoners dig their own graves before mass executions. Simply horrific. Some of the theories as to why may not be appreciated by history purists, but good books are written with flair and the author is writing with a purpose. The why additions can be ignored if so desired. The SS Einsetzguppen divisions perpetrated these mass killings in their official "actions". Then the genocide was moved to the extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, to be more efficient. This is one of the saddest stories in history. People need to not forget what happened. Other books I highly recommend about World War II can be found at these Listmania lists: http://www.amazon.com/World-War-II-WWII-Classics/lm/3U1FUEGJC8XNB/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_title_full http://www.amazon.com/Hitler-The-Rise-and-Fall-of-the-Third-Reich/lm/1MC4LN8F8BHUV/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_title_full http://www.amazon.com/lm/1FLKVTW4PZUEO/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_view?ie=UTF8&lm_bb=

Masters of Death is the most harrowing book I've ever come across. Many parts I had to repeat several times as I really couldn't believe what I'd just read. Some of the photographs are intensely distressing - beware, there are images you will never delete from your mind once you've seen them. I read the book for the reason that the author said he wrote it - to in a small way bear witness. Because the victims deserve their story to be told. Because although they died silently, the world should not be silent about their deaths. I was in mild shock when I finally finished reading. It was like emerging from an alternate evil universe. We use the word 'evil' too lightly these days. No horror writer could even start to imagine the scale, the scope, the terrible individual detail of these crimes. The magnitude of other mass killings during WWII - the millions later in the gas chambers, the suicidal infrantry assaults by the Red Army against the invading Nazis, not to mention the massive losses still resounding from WWI - for a while obscured the actions of the Einsatzgruppen. Only twenty thousand people shot here, thirty thousand people shot there. Many, many unnamed Babi Yars. Mass graves, unexhumed to this day, all over Eastern Europe. A method called 'Sardinenpackung' is perfected to fit bodies most efficiently into mass graves - a Kepler Conjecture for the evil universe. But each victim is shot singly, personally, up close - Adolf Eichmann, big picture logistics man for the Reich, is disgusted when brains splatter his coat as he inspects an execution. Some very discordant things hang in the air after this book. Not a few of the Einsatzgruppen members are distressed by having to kill babies and children, notwithstanding Hitler's rationalization that the children will just grow up to avenge their parents. Impersonal gassing techniques were then developed to prevent the child-murderers suffering psychological damage from their crimes, although Himmler used such distress to back up his assertions that the SS were really decent human beings at heart - there was just this 'Jewish Problem' and, you know, somebody had to do it. Heinrich Himmler, unfit weakling and squeamish runt, the very last person to be championing genetic quality, went unpunished, as did the vast majority of the Einsatzgruppen. Taking the coward's way out, he took cyanide when captured and was dumped in an unmarked grave. "It was no killing pit, but it would do."

Richard Rhodes has written a fresh reconsideration of one of the worst episodes in human history: the story of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile German SS units that roamed eastern Furope in 1941 and 1942 slaughtering defenseless Jews and Slavs. Rhodes is a skillful writer and he makes this difficult material bearable and even compulsively readable. He relies on survivor testimony and confessions of perpetrators to paint an extrordinarily vivid picture of the most terrible things that people can do to each other. He makes individuals come alive again, such as Heinrich Himmler, the Reichfuhrer-SS, a "rigid, fussy pervert" who by the end of the war was collecting furniture and bookbindings made from the flesh and bones of his victims. I have always been suspicious of labeling Nazi killers as mechanically banal, and Rhodes confirms many of them weren't. As a result of the things they did, many of them became alcoholics, committed suicide or were carted off to mental hospitals. It's good to know [those individuals] suffered spiritual and psychological consequences for their acts. They knew what they were doing was evil, even as they proclaimed its righteousness. Even Himmler had a wretched emotional life, and had crippling pychosomatic stomach pain. The experience of the Einsatzgruppen was so oulandishly monstrous that it led the National Socialist leadership to develop killing methods that were more manageable for the killers--that is the extermination camps such as Auschwitz. (Small comfort for the murdered.) This book is suffused with a strongly moral point of view. Rhodes relies on a theory of "violent socialization" to explain how "ordinary men" could commit such atrocities. They weren't so ordinary; they had gone through a process of brutalization, by training or life experience, that prepared them for dealing out mass death. Rhodes convincingly demonstrates how the vast massacre of World War I prepared the way for the even greater hecatomb of World War II. But the brutalization process isn't determined: one has to *choose* to return evil for evil, to strike back at the world with your own brutality. In that sense, this is a hopeful book: despite how the world treats us, we don't have to become monsters, as the exemplary lives of many of the survivors Rhodes got to know bear out.

"Masters of Death" by Richard Rhodes, subtitled, "The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust". Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Due to the subject matter, this is a tough book to read. Richard Rhodes has documented, in explicit detail, the killing of more than 20 million human beings by Nazi Germany. For almost all of them, their only crime was to be "Untermensch", or sub-human, according to the Nazi definition. Rhodes notes that twice as many Slavs ( 3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens and 3.3 million Soviet POWs ) were killed than were Jews. (Page 157). The Jews were, however, the main target, with grandiose Nazi plans for the elimination of 700,000 Jews in unoccupied France, 330,000 in England and the even the 4000 Jews who lived in Ireland. (page 237) The Nazi plan was to empty the eastern steppes of the indigenous Slavs and re-settle Germans there. Adolph Hitler identified "...Stalin's communism ..[as] ...a new form of Russian imperialism" (Page 86) and the resettlement of the Germans in the East would form a barrier against the ancient enemy. The first few chapters developed a psychological theory of the bully-murderer and how that cruel personality type was not only legitimatized but also became the norm in the SS groups. The author has made Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) the central character in the book's development of the evolution of the killing methods. Himmler could not live up to his own ideals of the SS hero. The shooting of an actual person, "up close and personal", was too much for Himmler's weak stomach and, this, coupled with the economy of mass murder, led to the introduction of the gas chambers. Impersonal killing had been instituted in the Third Reich with the physician-assisted killing of the handicapped German children in the Autumn of 1939 (page 154). Some of the chapters are especially difficult with German reports, enumerating the killing of so many Jews, here in this town and in that city, and the pages flow into an accountant's recital, when it is human lives being considered. The author brings it all to life by identifying each reporting officer and noting that numbers were "absurdly precise". Rhodes does stumble here and there. As noted in other Amazon reviews, he has the U.S. declaring war on Germany, when, historically, Germany went first and then, Congress, not Roosevelt, declared war on Germany. In the note on page 125, he applies the term, "An inflated reference to Stalin's partisan order" concerning that "... the Russian side had ordered to have the SS members and Party members shot " ... when these Germans were taken prisoner. I do not know why he terms this "an inflated reference" as all German prisoners were being shot out of hand, so quickly that Soviet officers had to give orders to hold them for interrogation. (See "The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945" by Alfred-Maurice De Zayas). Finally, SS-Gruppenfueher Max Thomas was first introduced on page 163. The author could have told us more about an individual who "...was a doctor by profession" and had such an obviously English name. All of this adds up to four stars.

This chilling study brings home to the reader the reality of how the genocide of the Jews and others planned by the Nazis did not actually begin with the mass, "industrial" exterminations in the gas chambers of the Concentration Camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka etc., but with small groups of murderers known as the "Einsatzgruppen". Units which were formed by Himmler and Heydrich immediately before the invasion of the East/Soviet Union and which followed the advancing German Armies. "In depth" is a term that is perhaps sometimes mis-used, but it is deeply appropriate when applied here to this disturbing, detailed study of what can only be described as "cold blooded murder" by these SS murder squads. This thoroughly researched and extremely well written book is at times a "heavy" and "difficult" read. Nevertheless it is indeed a major contribution towards the study of the Nazi Holocaust which describes the construction and utilisation of these Nazi murder squads. Units cited in this work as often consisting of many professional, "educated" men such as lawyers, doctors, architects etc., and who participated in an acutely "personal" manner of murder where some 1.5 million men, women and children were barbarically executed by shooting. The bodies of their victims described as then being disposed of in "killing pits" (often anti-tank ditches, natural ravines or freshly dug pits). Many of the mass graves each containing many thousands of innocent victims, frequently shot one by one and buried layer upon layer. Many of these graves are still marked as memorials to this day. Photographs of some are included in this book. One such massacre described in the book is that at Babi Yar. A ravine where Jewish men, women, and children were systematically machine-gunned in a two-day orgy of execution. Here the Jews in their thousands, with such pathetic belongings as they could carry, were herded into barbed-wire areas at the top of the ravine, guarded by Ukrainian collaborators. There they were stripped of their clothes and beaten, then led in irregular squads down the side of the ravine. The first groups were forced to lie on the ground, face down, and were machine-gunned by the Germans who kept up a steady volley. Their bodies were covered with thin layers of earth and the next groups were ordered to lie over them, to be similarly murdered. To carry out the murder of 34,000 human beings in the space of two days in such a manner is difficult to comprehend. Indeed, much of this book is so disturbing that it is frequently only possible to read in small sections at a time. Photographs are provided showing how some of the 1.5 million innocent Jews and innocent Poles and Russians were marched to such "pits" as these before being lined up and summarily executed. The task of these Units was to kill the Jews on the spot - but not only Jews; communists, Gypsies, political leaders, and the intelligentsia were also killed. The book also describes the beginning of the use of mobile gas "killing vans" where the victims carried in sealed areas to the rear were subjected to the vehicles' exhaust fumes. The graphic detail provided in this work is in itself difficult to read and might upset many readers, but the author makes no effort to trivialise the suffering of the utterly defenceless victims and the cold blooded barbarity of their executors. Many eyewitness accounts and testimonies of those who participated in the slaughter have been uncovered and are used to provide an essential reference and authenticity to the context of this presentation. Early on in the book the writer provides a commentary on the nature of violence and how these "ordinary" men became capable of carrying out such atrocities. The study further documents the impact of these mass murders on the individual perpetrators and the ensuing psychological traumas that many endured. Some readers might disagree with the conclusions drawn here or like myself feel uneasy with the section of the book which tries to fathom the mind-set of these murderers. The study makes specific mention of how Adolf Hitler cherished a fanatic hatred of the Jews and how he personally ensured that the highest priority was placed on their total elimination. The book also analyses how Hitler also intended to enslave and destroy with privation the far more numerous Slavic peoples as well. This is an extremely powerful book and a necessary addition to anyone's library on the Holocaust. Recommended.

Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes is one of the most difficult and disturbing books that I have ever read. It tells the story of the creation of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the formations that were created by Himmler to kill the Jews, Poles and Russians that had the misfortune to fall behind the German lines. This is book about more than the mere numbers of the dead, although the numbers themselves are horrific. What makes the book so upsetting is the description of the way in which the deaths took place. Rhodes is not writing about civilians who were killed as part of a military exercise. The SS-Einsatzgruppen were not military fighting formations; rather, they were tasked with the job of eliminating all Jews and other undesirables from lands occupied by the Nazi's. The descriptions include thousands of men, women and children lined up like in a grocery line and walked into pits to lie down one next to another where they were shot. They also include citizens of countries that were occupied who used the opportunity to round up Jewish citizens and kill them through the use of sledge hammers. These are just two examples, but they are representative of the dozens that are described by Rhodes. As one might tell, this is not bedtime reading. Rhodes does an excellent job in describing the formation of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, as well as the men who formed it. What appears to be the underlying premise of the book is how could the men who carried out these terrible crimes have done so and kept even some semblance of sanity. Rhodes describes the heavy drinking and other diversions used as well as the peer pressure used to extract conformance. In this case conformance meant systematic close up murder of thousands. The basic tenant is that these men were habituated through a deliberate process. However, this explanation goes only so far. The acts of the SS-Einsatzgruppen were not an isolated incident such as the barbarity of the Japanese sacking of Nanking (See The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang), but a concerted, continuos effort over several years where men were forced to participate in the slaughter of innocent men, women and children head-on. Rhodes explanation for the acts of the SS-Einsatzgruppen is left hallow. At times the barbarity of the acts overwhelms an attempt to explain the whys. And for that matter the whys may seem irrelevant. But Rhodes attempts to explain the whys and the hows is at a minimum a noble efforts. After finishing the book one does not have the answer, but that does not mitigate against the fact that this is a book worthy of reading.

This new book by Richard Rhodes is, in my opinion, a quite interesting attempt to exhaustively explore the terrible brutality of the S.S. Einsatzgruppen (Special Group) created under Heinrich Himmler's specific direction to carry out an loosely organized mass extermination of Eastern captive populations as the Wehrmacht pressed into Poland and the Soviet Union during the successive Eastern campaigns. I purposely have used the term "captive populations" to connote that it was a population much more inclusive of local residents, including communist collaborators, dissidents, gypsies, and other "undesirables", targeted for extinction rather than being limited strictly to Jews. It is, I believe, a demonstrable mistake to try to argue that the Third Reich was primarily interested in ridding itself of its Jewish population. Remember, the initial population of Jews so murdered were not deported German Jews, but rather indigenous Jews living in Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania, part of the captive populations. We do well to remember that the Nazis' stated purpose for conducting the entire Eastern campaign was to gain what Hitler often referred to as "Liebenstraum", or "living room" for future German expansion and colonization. Thus, the Third Reich intended from the onset of hostilities in one fashion or another to forcibly displace the native population through a combination of techniques, including extermination, sustained slave labor, and starvation. Historical questions regarding the etiology of the resulting Nazi policy of extermination of European Jews revolve around a single question: was it Hitler's intent from the beginning to do so, or did the policy evolve from pragmatic and existential circumstance? The first line of argument, what is often called the "intentionalist"premise, is that as he stated in "Mien Kampf", the Fuhrer always intended to wipe out the Jewish peoples of Europe, and that his campaign proceeded, cautiously and tentatively at first, more due to political and logistical considerations than with anything else. The opposing argument, regarded to the "functional' premise, finds the genesis of the policy of systematic genocide of the Jews in the welter of events and circumstances that arose from the onset of the Eastern campaign as early in the fall of 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. This line of thought finds evidence in the Nazi's evolving efforts to employ ever more efficient and effective methodologies to deal with the captive populations of the East. Obviously, for either perspective to continue to have passionate adherants fifty years later indicates that both perspectives have considerable merit. Having said this, I find the so-called "functional" argument more persuasive and more consistent with the bulk of historical record. This perspective is not an fact attempt to attempt to argue that Hitler had no premeditation or predisposition regarding the eventual fate of European Jews and other targeted populations. Rather, it is more an argument as to how the Third Reich planned to capitalize best on the evolving existential circumstances to furhter its own immediate goals and objectives; as to whether it is more useful for the regime to temporarily enslave the subject population and work them to death, or to simply kill them quickly and dispose of them. What the historical record seems to show is that Hitler had given local area political subordinates considerable leeway in managing the dislocation process, especially in the first few months of occupation of Poland. It was the circumstances that arose and the difficulties associated with marshalling sufficient resources to feed, house, and surveil the indigenous captive populations that led to many of the initial efforts at systematic extermination. Otherwise, situations like those that led to the establishment, management, and horrors associated with the Warsaw Ghetto would never have come to pass. All that said, the book does indeed shed considerable light and detail at the devil that was the SS Einsatzgruppen. Sparing no grisly detail, Rhodes takes the reader on a horrifying busman's tour of what Hannah Arendt once described as the banality of evil. For those of us who have read widely regarding the details of the Holocaust, it is precisely this question of how seemingly civilized, educated, and humane individuals could have possibly participated in such activities. It is mind-boggling to imagine the murderous disregard many who did indeed actively engage in such crimes had toward the victims, both while they were perpetrating the murders as well as in retrospect. Many interviewed later voiced no serious qualms about having done so, and seemed to show little collective sense of shame or guilt over such brutal and wanton serial acts of mass murder. In fact, even the SS was taken aback by how little ill effect was demonstrated by the members of Einsatzgruppen, having expected many more psychiatric casualties than were noted. This is an absorbing book, one that very carefully details and describes the horror that was put in place in order to "vacate" the conquered territories for German colonization. One reels at the revelations of how members of the group, as well as the Wehrmacht in general, was systematically conditioned to generally view all Eastern Europeans as less than human, as a subspecies deserving no humane treatment. And the savage treatment dealt out was exactly what was intended, no consideration, no quarter, and no mercy. Eventually, for this they received the whirlwind, for the invading Soviet army was equally as brutal in their treatment of Germans as they eventually swept like a nightmare unleashed all the way into Berlin. This is a book I can highly recommend, but one so serious and so frank in its details that you will likely not "enjoy" reading it.

'Masters of Death' by Richard Rhodes is the disturbing account of the SS-Einsatzgruppen death squads that roamed the occupied territories of the eastern front of WW2. They were tasked with the liquidation of all Jews, as well as other enemies of the Third Reich such as partisans, gypsies, and communists. These death squads preceded the death camps that usually come to mind when speaking of the holocaust. Before the gas chambers and crematoriums, victims were simply rounded up, shot, and thrown into mass graves. Rhodes concludes that over a million men, women, and children were murdered in this way between 1941 and 1943. These events are recounted in graphic detail, capturing the experiences from the viewpoint of the victims, as well as the perpetrators. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I found Rhodes' use of the "violent socialization" theory to be compelling. He describes this four-stage development of the violent individual, and convincingly argues how this process can be essentially "industrialized" and used to turn ordinary men into murderers. He uses this theory as a counter to the "eliminationist anti-semitism" theory espoused by such authors as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. This theory essentially argues that because anti-semitism was so ingrained into German culture, that it was only a matter of time before something like the holocaust happened, and that the average German readily accepted these mass murders. Rhodes refutes this theory as simplistic, and reminds the reader that this was not your ordinary anti-semitism that manifested itself in the extermination of millions. Overall, I found this book to be very useful and enjoyable-inasmuch as a book on such a horrific topic can be-and although it is a bit redundant at times, I think it is a valuable contribution to Holocaust and/or Third Reich studies. With that said, the subject matter is unsettling, and it really brings home the absolute horror and criminality that this regime represented. Four stars for 'Masters of Death.'

Author Richard Rhodes has provided the reader with very graphic accounts of Jewish people being murdered during World War II. I realize many books have been written regarding this subject, but what this book provided me with was the author stating that emphasizing that psychological trauma that was suffered by those involved with the murder of noncombatants in no way lessens the crime. On the contrary, the mental conflict that is suffered provides evidence that the Einsatzgruppen were aware that what they were doing was wrong even though it came down as an order from the German government. Abigail Adams warned America during the writing of the Constitution to beware of putting umlimited power in the hands of men because all men would be tyrants if they could. This warning should have very well been heeded by Germany before Hitler came to power. As Rhodes states in his book, "Without robust checks and balances, a leader's appetite for domination...can become insatiable..." If you have read a number of other books on the holocaust, I don't know that you need to read this one, also. I found myself skimming parts of it. The parts describing Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich,"The Blond Beast" were interesting.

Excellent. One of the best books on this topic that I have read. Rhodes has done the world a great service by writing this thoroughly compelling book. It's so well written that it's easily quickly read, though an easy read with this subject matter sometimes is not that easy. This book gives an account of Himmler's personal witnessing of mass murder that I hadn't read before, not a very good showing for a member of the "master" race. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

In 1939 Hitler told the Senior Members of the Nazi Party and the Government of Germany, that the only way to insure that Germany could win the War in the East for Lebensraum would be to 'neutralize' the Jews. The Jews had been the reason that Germany had lost WWI, by their 'control' of the governments in France, England, Russia and the USA. Only by their destruction could Germany ensure the 'future' for their sons and grandsons. But how do you get rid of 11 million (based on the SS's own count) people? Do you drive them into the open marshes in Eastern Poland and let them die, do you deport them to Siberia... no you have to eliminate them, so that they do not come back to 'haunt' your children. Using this logic the SS created the Einsatz and Sonner Kommando groups to kill all of Europe's Jews. But killing is both psychological and physically brutalizing, not to mention burying all the bodies (which have a habit of decaying and marking the burial areas with escaping gas). Where they could, the SS used auxillaries, mostly Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, who were only too happy to help eliminate the Jews. For the last hundred years they had been killing Jews intermittently in Pogroms. Now they were being given 'legal' authority to rob, steal, rape, pillage and brutalize thousands of their neighbors. Break out the booze and party favors! This is not a book for the squeemish, parts of it can be very difficult to read especially the graphic descriptions of the killings. But it needs to be documented for the deniers and other idiots (are you listening Mel Gibson's father) who don't believe it was possible to kill that many people and get rid of the bodies. But after the killing fields of Rwanda and Cambodia, how could anyone deny that people are capable of anything.

This is a very well written book about the Horrors that the German Especial Action Squads committed. The author goes on a very linear path to show you month by month after Operation barbarossa started about how these action groups operated. That keeps you from getting lost. He shows you great maps of the areas. Tells you about Himmler, the man responsible for ordering these horrid acts. Finally, he makes you stop every once in a while, to think about the poor, poor people who went through this. They are dead of course, more than one million of them. The Holocaust is viewed by many as just the Extermination camps, the gas that was used to kill the victims and the huge ovens. Well, before all that could be started, Himmler and the German State authorized a less "humane" way as they put it, to get rid of it's main enemies, the Jews. The author describes the main cites were these massacres took place, moslty in Russia. At times you feel like you are right there, with the victims, in line with them, getting ready to meet the end. That's when you have to stop and hope nothing like this happens again. But then you see that it has, in Yugoslavia, and other places in Africa. We can never learn because hate blinds everything, even your heart. For many the end came when it shouldn't have. Germany had to be stopped and defeated so that these people would cease doing these horrible things. A quote from the book came from Himmler himself who said "in this Iron age, we have to sweep with Iron brooms" He was a man who ordered many to be killed but who could never do it himself. Read this book and understand why their can be no doubt, Germany had to be stopped.

History can bring back bloody memories that pokes me on April 19, 1993 and 1995 for emotional response to alcohol, joe camel, and the split slit system of natural born citizens making rules to keep money from being spent on people who were not born in America before they came to the United States. Gang policies with global ambitions got the rocks off in this book.

When the term Holocaust is mentioned, it usually conjures up images of death camps, barbed wire, and gas chambers. However, it must be remembered that the Final Solution had its beginnings elsewhere. The author has done good job in treating this subject that hasn't been touched upon in much depth before now in Holocaust literature, namely the subject of the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen, the group that carried out the deaths of millions in the East via mass shooting, burning, and gassing, is detailed in informative and often grisly fashion. The reader will recoil in horror at how supposedly civilized men, both German and others, commit the most unspeakable acts of depravity to the most defenseless of humanity. Some did so out of sadistic glee while others did so because of the perverse belief that they were doing their duty to Germany. It was this latter view that Himmler himself tried to foster without much success. This book is an important volume for anyone interested in the Holocaust or even World War II on the Eastern Front.

I bought this book on an occasion when my choices were to wait or to wait while reading and no other available book exceeded that rather low standard of appealing to me more than this one. I was therefore surprised to discover that this is a quite good book. There is enough gore to satiate the most fiendish of ghouls while providing analysis sufficient to challenge the intellect. But I come not to praise this book, but to criticize it. In a prior review, Mythbuster notes the error of stating that it was the US that declared war on Germany rather than the reality that Germany declared war on the US. When I read Mythbuster's review, I believed he was excessively nitpicking regarding a collateral issue but I was wrong. The author argues that it was the US's decision to declare war on Germany that fulfilled in Hitler's mind the precondition of the Holocaust that the Jews plunge the world into another world war and thus decided Hitler to exterminate not only the Eastern Jews but also the Jews of Western Europe. Although the author does not so argue, this error allows the argument that it was the United States rather than the Nazis who caused the Holocaust. While such an argument may be clearly facetious to the objective reader, the Holocaust deniers are well known to misquote or quote out of context Holocaust experts in their quest to absolve the Nazis of guilt. The author has thus added an arrow to the quiver of the pseudo-historians. Further this error on such a basic point causes one to question the veracity of details provided elsewhere in the book. Part of the strength of this book is the insight into the details of the lives and crimes of perpetrators and victims, but can we believe them? For example, Himmler is presented as being so traumatized by Hitler's order to exterminate the Eastern Jews in the spring of 1941 that he was forced to his bed by stomach cramps but can we rely on both the author's statements of fact and then his interpretation of those facts? As prior reviewer Barron Laycock notes, this book assumes rather than argues the functionalist rather than the intentionalist view of the Holocaust. That view will certainly anger some. (See Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners for a good argument of the intentionalist school.) The purpose of this book, however, is not to argue either the functionalist view or the intentionalist view, nor even to provide a history of the Holocaust. A major theme, if not the major theme, is the socialization of violence. Some of the theory is so obvious that one wonders why it must be stated but other aspects of the theory seem more grounded in speculation than in evidence, still more so once one gets to the error I have discussed in some detail above and which impeaches the credibility of the author enormously. Overall, this is a very interesting book and but for that one error, I would have given it five stars.

This is an exceedingly difficult book to read due to the graphic nature of the descriptions of mass killings on the eastern front during the early years of WWII. Most of the book is just recounting individual episodes of mass shootings of Jewish victims before the Russians were able to push the German army back. There are some interesting sections where Rhodes begins to try to bring some insights to the psychological effect these shootings had on the perpetrators. Rightly, Rhodes does not spend too much time on this side of it. However, as I read this book I didn't feel as though Rhodes was going anywhere with the book as a whole. There aren't any larger points to be made, it is basically just historical narrative about a horrific and evil time in history. As such, it is a valuable book. Certainly Rhodes tries to use the killings on the eastern front as the precursor to the killing soon to come in Western Europe, as the episodes described pre-date most of the concentration camps. So, a valuable history, but rather disjointed and none too well organized.

As an American Jew born in 1942, I heard vague stories about the Holocaust from my family and friends. Always, the focus was on the death camps and the ovens. Later, of course, I read in more detail about antisemitism in general and World War II. However, reading this book brought home to me the broader context of the attempt to destroy the Jewish people and the fact, which Rhodes focuses on, that the death camps were the end stage of a process that was even more horrible. This was a painful book to read, but necessary for me to fully appreciate the dimensions of the Holocaust. I now feel that everyone should have the opportunity to read this book. I am not saying it is the best on the subject (there are many I have not read), nor is it perfect. The writing is uneven and some of Rhodes' theories are unproven. But I do strongly recommend this book.

It's amazing to think that in a brief space of years the world would see three countries rise up and try to conquer their neighbors in the name of three insane doctrines. In Japan, we had the suicidal tendencies of the emperor as god fanatacism. In Russia, we had the mass murderer elevated to state leader in the form of Stalin. Of course, in Germany we had the brainwashing of a majority of its people by a crackpot bigot who belonged in an insane asylum. I believe that the common people of these countries were just as responsible for the atrocities committed by their states as their leaders. Masters of Death is about one such long term atrocity committed by Hitler and his political allies. Namely, that of the genocide of the Jewish race. This book basically chronicles the SS death squads assigned to kill Jews from the invasion of Poland up until Russia begins to turn the tide of the war and kicks the Germans back to their borders. Hitler was not killing Jews indiscriminately. It was all part of his gloriously foolish plan to make room for German colonists in Eastern Europe. Actually, maybe he was just killing them to suit his racist views. But this was the veil he moved under. The book is propelled a lot by eyewitness views of the massacres perpetrated by the Germans. Rhodes does a good job of showing the viewpoints not just of the Jews, but also Germans as they face abominable killings. Basically, the German army would roll into a town, kill all the most visible opponents of their rule, and then the SS would come in after and mop up, try to win the hearts of minds of the people, and then start to kill those left by the army and the Jewish population. Time and again we are treated to the same horrible situation in the book. The Jewish populations were at first rounded up and told they were being relocated and asked to take 3 days worth of clothes with them. They were then marched to a pit, ordered to strip sometimes and then shot, men, women, and children. Sometimes women were killed with their children in their arms. Sometimes the Jews were told to lay face down and a German came and shot them dead. Then the second group of Jews had to lay down on top of the freshly dead corpses as they were shot and son on. It's truly horrible. I got upset just looking at the scant pictures of these atrocities availible in the book. When you see these people in the pictures, you know they were about to die and they knew it too. In one picture, there is a group of Jewish women in their underwear and there is a kid, looks about 11 or 12 hiding behind her mothers arm. I cannot even imagine what it was like to have been there. It makes you very sad and also very angry at the German people of that time. This was a great book that needs to be read by everyone on the planet. We need to know just how barbaric the human race can get because I think we are complacent now and can no longer realize what evil is. I dont think we are capable of outrage anymore since we have been so sensitized to killing and murder thanks to television and movies. I truly believe that 9/11 and the recent Iraq war were simply rating events for the tv networks and that most people can't realize the horror of being there. This book does take you to that horror. The only thing I didn't agree with was Rhodes' attempts to explain why the Holocaust happened. He believes that most of the perpetrators had some childhood abuse or some event in their lives that legitimized violence as a means to an end. Any rational explanation of the Nazi's behavior to me is useless. To me, you had a leader in the form of Hitler who turned his whole country into an asylum. The mad leading the mad. We need to read this book to remember. We cannot forget that even the most civilized among us can revert to an animal.

This is one of the best books to really learn how the holocaust was physically carried out. The focus is on the Einsatzgruppen and their activities in Poland, Belarus, and Western Russia and the progression of the methodology used to "humanely" exterminate the Jewish people. The scary thing is that the "genickschuss" (simply shooting the victims in the nape of the neck) was the most efficient and probably painless method employed but the emotional toll it took on the SS men was too much for them to handle. That is when new, more "humane" methods began to be experimented with. This is a very accurate and very disturbing book.

Richard Rhodes has dealt with violent topics in the past but nothing matches the horrors committed in this book on such a personal level. Masters of Death (The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust) will bring the reader quite close to the horrificly committed mass murders from both the perspectivie of the killers and the victims (of those very few who managed to survive). There is a little pyschobabble near the beginning mixed in with small bios of Hitler and Himmler that does not entirely hold together but it is minimal and, in no way, interferes with the important story told here. The author shows how the killing of Jews in Eastern Europe developed the methods and hardened the men, by making horror routine, to the Holocaust that followed of whiich these first years of killings were a part. This book is an important addition to Holocaust literature by an accomplished writer. This book is both very hard to read and difficult to put down.

Warning: Richard Rhodes's "Masters of Death" is one of the most horrific books you're ever likely to read. It details very completely the history of the roving death squads who followed Adolf Hitler's armies into the conquered territories of the Soviet Union and unleashed the opening salvos of what would later become known as The Holocaust. Many people today think of The Holocaust in terms of Auschwitz and the other death camps. What tends to be forgotten is that the Eisatzgruppen units that started the mass killings of Jews racked up a death toll at least as high as those of the camps. And in most instances, the murders by these minions were even less humane, if that's possible. Rhodes, a fine writer and first rate historian, pulls no punches. Wherever possible, he uses the first hand accounts of both the survivors and the perpetrators to tell his gruesome story. The ghastly pictures that accompany the book only begin to hint and the true horror of the events described. Along the way, Rhodes explores the psychology of the murderers, particularly that of both Hitler and of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, the man who allowed his whole personality to be subjugated to the Fuhrer. Rhodes also provides enough of the history and ideology of Nazi Germany to set the proper context. At just under three hundred pages of text, the book makes its point concisely. Lest the reader think that what happened has been confined to the dustbin of history, Rhodes points out that Einsatzgruppen methods were recently resurrected by the death squads in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Overall, an incredibly powerful and important book that serves as a grim reminder of the darker side of human nature.

I can't even begin to tell you everything that I learned from this book. "Masters of Death" was my text book for my "history of the world wars" class last semester. This book gives you an indepth look into the beginings of Himmler's S.S and their chilling crimes on humanity. "Masters of Death" is a well researched text that gives an uncanny perspective into the final solution with out beging repeative or dull. This book is full with eye witness acounts, survivor testimonies and statments from S.S officals. Backgrounds of S.S big wings like Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann are also included. This book doesn't pull any punches. It gives you exactly what happened how it happened. Be prepaired to read things that amaze and sadden you. This is a powerful book and you'll remember what you read long after your done. I highly recommend it.

The history of industrial mass murder committed in the concentration camps continues to stir the conscience of humanity. The efficient ruthlessness consigned to the SS is a sullen reminder of the inhumanity endeavored by a few, but suffered by the many. Auschwitz, Belzec, Mauthausen... once provincial and pastoral regions of anonymity is now synonymous with the greatest crimes against humanity. But what of those conquests that stifled and expunged the innocent cultures of the East before the formulation of the gas chambers? Richard Rhodes diligently tends to this little known occurrence in history in a detailed and flawed account of the Einsatzgruppen. Before I examine individual elements of this book, I wish to emphatically state that Rhodes is a scholar of repute and a brilliant researcher. His analysis of political neuroses and paranoia in the Cold War is objectively captured in his masterpiece "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". Rhodes' fascination with the scientific and political developments of the atomic bomb is his specialty, which, perhaps in some measure, accounts for his lack of rich analysis and intimate understanding of the military order within the Third Reich. Rhodes' over reliance on Lonnie Athens', a behavioral psychologist, is jarring and distracting as his diagnoses of the criminal mind is anachronistic when framed upon the violent and anti-social manifestations of SS members. Rhodes' persistent desire to comprehend the violence in the East seems futile, as it is impossible to reconcile a coherent understanding with an enterprise that was manifestly irrational and inhuman. In this regard, I wholly admire Rhodes' refusal of sanitizing the historical ledger, but I would be remiss if I hadn't notified potential buyers that his overbearing personal commentary impedes the flow of the book, and trust me there are individual moments of sheer brilliance. When Rhodes eschews his pseudo-psychological position, he excels in instilling an impenetrable sense of dread. His methodical and slow pace is punctuated by moments of inconceivable barbarity and atrocities that will physically repel you. His lucid, nightmarish exposition of the Babi Yar and Rumbula massacres is unparalleled in evoking your despair, loathing and pity for these hapless victims. Despite individual moments that are historically and emotionally astute, it falters when Rhodes digresses to discuss the human condition in the Nazi state. Particularly redundant is his superficial and compact biography of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, which feels out of context and superfluous to the conceit of the central history, which is compelling without these redundant additions. The inclusion of Athens' perception of the criminal mind is valuable in itself, but incongruous to the history of the Einsatzgruppen. Furthermore, Rhodes has paid too much emphasis on the wrong people. It goes without saying that Heinrich Himmler is integral in characterizing the occult and subservient affectations of the SS Empire, but what of actual Einstazgruppe officials? Otto Ohlendorf, Paul Blobel, Otto Rasch, Walter Stahlecker, Heinz Jost, Martin Sandberger, and Werner Braune demand more attention. There is, however, an inspired emphasis on Odilo Globocnik, the Slovenian born gauleiter of Austria, who later oversaw the early stages of the Final Solution. This brutal enigma has been saliently omitted from popular history, which is perplexing given his role in the Final Solution, though Rhodes was right to include him. The gripes I have with the book stem from my intimate understanding of the Third Reich, so perhaps I'm nitpicking, as most history buffs tend to do, but I must say that I found the book difficult to finish. How much endless depiction of madness, torture, viscera and gore can one take? This criticism, I realize, probably seems inconsistent with reference to the subject matter, but I nonetheless still struggled to read the latter chapters. Those conversant in the history of Nazi Germany will find a book of great individual sections that doesn't quite gel as a whole; others will either be totally engaged in its morbid occupation, or alienated because of its specificity. I do recommend the book, though, because it is the ONLY book in English that documents the Einsatzgruppen with some degree of success.

The role that the Einsatzgruppen played in the formation of the Holocaust is a vitally important topic, but one that is often given short shrift by historians and journalists. This book, therefore, would be an important one even if it weren't so well-written and readable. And it really is an excellent book. If it's not the most minutely-detailed or profound book in the world, it's very readable, as I said, and punches home the horror and tragedy of the story with considerable force. It's like Martin Gilbert's THE HOLOCAUST in that regard. And Rhodes's use of Lonnie Athens's theories about the genesis of violent criminal behavior (so well-covered in WHY THEY KILL) gives the book an added dimension. Is there any nonfiction American writer today with anything like Rhodes's diversity of interests, broad mind, and narrative skills? I can't think of anyone else who comes close.

This is an excellently-written and thoroughly-researched account which sends a chill to the spine. Rhodes has produced an outstanding piece of work which balances academic research with a writing style which is very accessible - crisp, unadorned narrative unencumbered by personal views. In essence, he lets the facts speak for themselves, and one can't help but by struck by just how explosive those facts are. For example, the eyewitness accounts of the terror imposed by the SS-Einsatzgruppen as they moved through southern Russia in 1940, and the "scorched earth" policy they employed to render the terrain useless to the Russian Army as winter approached. In particular, the brutal repression imposed by the dimuntive SS-Brigadeführer Franz Mueller, who moods swings and drug addiction made life terrible not just for the Cossack peasantry but for his own brigade staff; the use of tanks against defenceless civilians by Panzer squadron commander Standartenführer Jorg-David Peichardt; and the failed attempts to use new military technology against the civilian population by Hauptsturmführer Jens Deanarnoldt, who only avoided the gallows at Nuremberg by virtue of the fact that his technology repeatedly failed to deploy properly. In all, Rhodes estimates that maybe 2 million people died at the hands of the SS-Einsatzgruppen in 1940-42, and it could have been more, were it not for some quick thinking by peasant leaders such as Yuri Noelduli in south Ossetia, for example, who mobilised the local political faction Fanje-Fall to collect a large sum of money which he used to pay off the corrupt officers of Einsatzgruppe C, who swiftly moved on to neighbouring territory without wreaking too much havoc in south Ossetia. (Noelduli disappeared shortly thereafter - whether with what was left of the money, or killed by the SS, was never recorded.) Altogether, this is a superb book, well written and thoroughly researched - buy it from Amazon and you won't be disappointed.

I am not a scholar, but for a long time have had an interest in the Holocaust. This has evolved over the years from reading personal concentration camp survivor stories, through to studying works by authors such as Gitta Sereny, Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen that try to assist in uncovering what lies behind the behaviours of the perpetrators. Rhodes’ book – Masters of Death – is probably the best I have read in terms of helping me understand a little better how seemingly ordinary men can do extraordinarily evil things. I found the chapter Vicious Circles particularly illuminating, the more so since I do not recall reading anything quite like this in any other reference. I cannot speak from an academic perspective, but as a ‘man on the street’ with an interest in learning more and understanding better, I found Rhodes’ book to be outstanding. Well written, it is not for the squeamish, but readers of Holocaust literature must surely have learned by now that this is not a topic for the faint of heart.

The shelves of the literature on the Holocaust have for too long been without a volume describing the men and the operations of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile murder squads that were unleashed upon Europe in the wake of the German invasion of Poland and, later, the Soviet Union. Richard Rhodes undertook to write such a book and the result is "Masters of Death". It is not an easy book to read, and there is no reason that it should be. It is a chronicle of stunning, almost mind-numbing, cruelty and death. Significantly, and perhaps most importantly, Rhodes attempts to create a history that reaches beyond the impersonal body count of victims with which so many books on subjects such as this are concerned. Rhodes examines the perpetrators themselves, the men who served in these killing squads and those who led them. In doing so he delves into theories that have been created to account for violent behavior and he strives to apply them to these uniformed killers. It seems that he does not readily accept that many of them were, as Professor Christopher Browning described them,"Ordinary Men". I believe that Rhodes fell short of the mark here. Himmler seems to me portrayed as little more than a two-dimensional desk killer, and despite the application of behavioral theories and the examination of social and political backrounds, I completed this book still convinced that Professor Browning was, frighteningly, much closer to the truth in his characterization of the SS and Police personnel who filled out the ranks of the Einsatzgruppen. But neither this book nor Browning's compelling "Ordinary Men" should stand alone at this point. They should be read together, for in placing them side by side we have a more complete picture than we have ever had before of a time when there was an indescribable darkness upon the earth, a darkness in mens' hearts, a darkness that was spread across the sky by funeral pyres created of human beings stacked like cordwood.

Masters of Death is a difficult book to read, at times almost unbearable. It is an examination of the early years of the Holocaust, illuminating for the first time the monstrous evil of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads who followed along behind the Nazi combat troops, executing more than one and a half million innocent human beings. Rhodes shows us that educated German professionals commanded the killing teams carrying out such massive crimes as the massacre at the killing pits of Babi Yar. He has provided us with evidence of just how evil the Nazis were and how deep the depths of depravity can be

Rhodes delivers a book like few others, the sheer horrific nature of the subject is delivered in such a way that pulls at your soul. A difficult book to read at times but a must for all if only to remind us why it can never happen again. Rhodes gives a masterful mix of fact and firsthand accounts from both sides and delves into the question how can humanity visit the horror of the holocaust on itself.

Rhodes has written a memorial in print to the victims of the holocaust. Too often, histories of this subject devolve into numbers or catalogs of atrocities. Rhodes has been able to convey the humanity of the victims and give a searing sense of the inhumanity of the perpetrators. His use of personal accounts and documentary evidence is masterful and moved me deeply. His character studies of the perpetrators, particularly Himmler, are enlightening and chilling. This book should be required reading.

Powerful book. Particularly heart wrenching for me since I have a two year old son. Rhodes' book upset me to the point that my wife noticed and asked why was I reading it if it bothred me so? I said any suffering this is causing me is nothing compared to the suffering Rhodes describes. I didn't particularly care for the psychoanalysis parts. Mainly because it seemed somewhat out of place in a history book. I'm sure everyone has said or heard someone say why did the Jews "let" themselves be killed? I loved how Rhodes wrote how Eichman and Blobel (an Einsatzgruppen commander) walked willingly to their own executions after the war. Highly recommended.

This is not a fun read but there is so much in this book that is interesting. I thought Rhodes does a great job putting this history together. He explains how, who & why this happened. He also does a very thorough job explaining the Einsatzgruppen. It is also interesting to hear some of the stories & conflicts these groups had with the regular Wehrmacht soldiers. It will leave an impression on you.

This book is as compelling as it is heart breaking, vividly depicting the first-hand accounts of Nazi brutality perpetrated against the Jews. The gifted uathor has, for the most part, allowed the facts to speak for themselves without offering too much personal interjection, but it is his thoughtful and insightful commentary that is missing from this otherwise impressive work.

I have read many books on the Holocaust, but none was so gripping as this one. While the horror of individual death is tragic, the complete eradication of entire villages, towns and cities is beyond belief. The cold, callous treatment of the Jewish people should never be forgotten or denied, and this book helps maintain their memory. I would recommend this book for any serious student of history.

I have read a number of books dealing with the holocaust, and the harsh, inhuman atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi's and there collaborators: But I found the graphic description's within this book far too much for me to digest. Whilst the book is an excellent documentary, and record of the actions of the SS in occupied Eastern Europe, I was too shocked by what I read to be able to finish the book. The harrowing descriptions of the murders of the children by the SS almost brought a tear to my eye. I think this will be the last book I read that concerns itself with this subject matter. It really can inform the reader all that they may need to know (and some that they may wish not to know) on the depravity and bestial nature of the Nazi's final solution. Tim Vickery.

The book reads like it was constructed from thousands of individual index cards. Sudden shifts in focus. Occasional interjections "here's something almost no one else has noticed..." Themes introduced and then dropped. Since it does not appear that Richard Rhodes has done original research in German, Polish, or Russian, the bibliography is a good starting point for those interested in doing their own holocaust research in English.

A key part of the Holocaust story, even with some flaws. Minor flaws are dates of U.S declarations of war. Major flaw is the failure to demonstrate how the Lonnie Athens theories of violence apply to specific individuals, or to the larger Nazi group. Also, the author's views on the basic nature of Jews compared to that of ethnic Germans, while interesting, is not fully developed. The Specific cases of brutality are just beyond comprehension

The reason why I bought this book was to understand if the writing would prove true. Well it certainly proved right. In the summer of 1941 we all knew the horror had began, it was on a scale of which could not be concealed within the borders of Duetch Land. As time progressed, the crimes progressed to outward flaunting, scenes which I am sure I cannot speak here, but the book does that. I can say with 100% certainty this is an accurate account and recommend. I wish to recommend a wonderful book which goes further, SB:1 or God by Karl Mark Maddox

With newly available Russian sources, the author tells again the story of Germany's plan to open up more land for expansion. The horror that is detailed is must reading, though mind numbing. Read so it may never happen again.

There is no excuse. The guys from SS were simply evil men. There's no reasonable explanation for the killing they did against civilians, women and children. Well, you can argue that the United States did the same when droping the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagazaky... In short, war is hell, but the metodic killing of millions of people was something never heard about in the history of mankind, and that was executed by a people (the German people) teoretically highly developed, lovers of philisophy, arts and music. It's simply unbeliavable.

Great

This book blows away the myth of a unknowing wermacht and civilian populations complicity in the holocaust. It makes one think that anyone could stoop to mass murder given the right circumstances. Shockingly scary and super relevant in todays world of heightened racial and religeous tension.

This is a silly book masquerading as a "serious" history book. Pop history commingling with pop psychology. There are also some serious whoppers which made me chuckle. There was a book written in 1966 about the SS which clearly states everything that this work clumsily attempts to without all the hare-brained theorizing.. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of WW2 and specifically the German/Soviet theatre knows the basic story of the einsatzgruppen and their crimes. Nothing new here except for higher death totals which seems to be the current fashion in History. As usual in pop history works historiography is basically books written by other pop history guys so we end up with a daisy chain of "facts" which are all based on the other guys' books. Not many original sources used and definitely nothing new say from Bad Arolsen or other newly opened archives.The pop psychology aspect manifests itself as a rehashing of another guy's (Lonnie Somebody-or-Another) theory of violence as applied to Germans of the WW2 era. Himmler never took all the "steps" so ended up as a "desk murderer" and coward unable to physically face the violence he caused. Ironically one of many contradictions in this book (and one of the whoppers) is a tale of Himmler ordering a special gassing of 300 attractive Jewish women to witness himself. The incompletely violent and squeamish Himmler of Lonnie Athen's theory becomes a leering bloodthirsty psycho! Ditto the Gita Sereny recollection of the Reichfuhrer's skull and bone chairs- someone's vague childhood memories become a psycho-historical proof a theory. In this book all eyewitness testimony which applies to Nazi victims is taken unquestioningly at face value and all other eyewitness tales (say of Soviet atrocities) are apt to be exaggerations! Thus a tale of hundreds of people being melted with quicklime in a pit is recounted as fact (impossible as that is) and a tale of a Soviet commissar killing a woman and eating her heart is "improbable" (which it also is). The oft-told tale of babies being thrown up in the air and speared with bayonets is told as if true (to prevent ricochets!) even though this EXACT story has been told about Germans and others since at least WW1. Folklore more than fact. There are many photographs extant recording German atrocities in Soviet Russia so there is no doubt that they killed many people by shooting- Jews, communists and partisans, Byelorussians and Ukranians too. However some tales of mass shootings in this book are highly exaggerated- they become unbelievable. The Rumbula Forest story is one of these. The story as officially told and the attending mathematical gymnastics needed to make it true doesn't add up. Anyone who has ever shot firearms, anyone who has worked in a factory, anyone who has tried to get recalcitrant people to do something and anyone one with a working knowledge of Murphy's Law will see that the story as told in this book is an exaggerated mess. Many thousands of people were maybe shot but not 24,000 in 2 days...by 12 shooters... in 8 hours a day! We know the Germans shot 24,000 people because they used 24,000 rounds of ammo?! More of this shaky math/historiography is evident in one of the summing up paragraphs about the einsatzgruppen where the recorded 750,000 victims has to be really 1,300,000 because of later unrecorded activity by other entities and really more like 2,000,000 victims by adding in non-Jewish victims. Pretty shaky history really when there can be such blase attitudes about differences of hundreds of thousand even millions depending on when and by who history is written. Both the victims and the perpetrators in this sad story have ample reason to exaggerate and obfuscate- at the time the einsatzgruppen commanders would have had plenty of motivation to inflate their numbers simply to look good and later the surviving victims under the auspices of the vengeful Allies would have had plenty of reason to inflate numbers also. The truth is inscrutable but I believe would reveal lower numbers then are current in official history. One last thought- the story of the Holocaust tells us that the industrialized death camps were made because of the hardship suffered by the men in the einsatzcommandos but in this book most of the actual shooters seem to be enthusiastic happy killers- heck- if you could kill 12,000 people a day with 12 volunteer shooters why would you mess with such an efficient system?

This is a superficial and silly book, a manual in the credulous use of unreliable sources, a comedy of errors. I will attempt to illustrate this by means of appropriate examples, but can only scratch the surface of this book's folly. One of Rhodes' bungles concerns lime, or quicklime. He gives prominent place to a story told by Mieczyslaw Sekiewicz about Germans killing Jews with lime, and states that is was "an attempt to combine killing and corpse processing into one operation: slaked lime dissolves organic matter, including human tissue." He also writes that "the Germans frequently used quicklime to accelerate the decomposition of corpses killed by shooting." Contrary to popular opinion, lime does not incinerate or liquidate bodies. On the contrary, it preserves them. This fact was verified experimentally by A. Lucas in his book "Forensic Chemistry" (pp. 226-229). Lucas concluded that his experimental results "bear out the statements already made, namely first, that lime is a preservative, and secondly that the act of slaking lime in contact with a dead body, whether the slaking is brought about gradually or all at once, does not destroy the body." The 2011 paper "Effects of hydrated lime and quicklime on the decay of buried human remains using pig cadavers as human body analogues" offers further information on the preservative effect of lime, and found that pigs buried in limed graves for six months were well preserved, while unlimed buried pigs decomposed considerably. As Bergen Evans wrote in his Natural History of Nonsense, "That quicklime will 'eat' a dead body is an old delusion that has brought several murderers to the noose, for, actually, it is a preservative that instead of removing the evidence keeps it fresh for the coroner's eye. Thus the fourteen victims of Mrs. Belle Gunness, of La Porte, Indiana, rhetorically known as 'the Queen of Abattoir Acres,' were found in a quite recognizable state, owing to her having gone to the trouble to bury them in quicklime. And Oscar Wilde, who poetically asserted that quicklime ate the flesh by day and the bones by night, served to refute his own assertion, for he was himself buried in quicklime, and on his exhumation two years later was found to be well preserved." Clearly this is a delusion that is common not only among murderers, but also among holocaust historians. Rhodes devotes an entire chapter to the alleged massacres in the Babi Yar ravine, where he claims 125,000 people were shot and buried. The reason the bodies were not found is said to be that in August and September 1943 the colossal mass grave was destroyed in a huge effort involving bulldozers, massive bone crushing machinery, and mass cremation on pyres the flames of which could be seen from Kiev. This enormous project is said to have finished on September 28. However, a Luftwaffe aerial photograph of September 26 plainly shows the Babi Yar ravine with undisturbed vegetation and topography and proves that no such industrial-scale activity took place in it. As the historian Dr. Joachim Hoffmann has written, "The NKVD introduced the previously unknown Ravine of the Old Woman into Soviet war propaganda in November 1943 for the first time in connection with the desperate attempts at concealment in the Katyn case. Soon after the recapture of the Ukrainian capital, a party of Western press correspondents was invited by the Soviets to inspect the ravine of Babi Yar, now alleged to be the location of the massacre. Material proof, however, seems to have been a bit scanty. An evaluation of the numerous air photos in recent years apparently leads to the conclusion that, in contrast to the clearly visible, extensive mass graves dug by the NKVD at Bykovnia (Bykivnia), Darnica, and Bielhorodka, and in contrast to the clearly visible mass graves at Katyn [...] the terrain of the ravine of Babi Yar remained undisturbed between 1939 and 1944, i.e., including the years of German occupation." Rhodes, however, prefers to ignore the clear evidence of the aerial photographs in favor of the "witnesses" presented by the NKVD. Rhodes' account of the alleged death camps, while conventional, is also fatally flawed on technical grounds. He writes that "the new death camps, which would require larger quantities of gas and to which Himmler begrudged only minimal funds, would borrow from gas van technology and generate carbon monoxide cheaply using large diesel engines scavenged from Russian tanks and submarines." The first flaw in this is the mention of submarines. Not only are submarine engines massive and unwieldy, but the Germans never captured a Russian submarine! The more serious flaw to this story is the use of diesel engines. Contrary to popular perception, diesel exhaust is not particularly lethal and it contains little carbon monoxide. As

excellent

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The Soviets had a saying "Keep lying until it becomes the truth", so it is important to keep an open mind while reading such potentially powerful books as this one. When presented with a quote like the following, it is easy for one's emotional response to overpower one's sense of reason. It does not make good reading and is unfortunately not the sign of a good historian. 'A woman in a small town near Minsk saw a young German soldier walking down the street with a year-old baby impaled on his bayonet. " The baby was still crying weakly," she would remember. "And the German was singing. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that he did not notice me."' (p. 140) If you have studied this period in any detail, you will be aware that the German Army and the SS were completely at odds concerning the execution of civilians, especially women and children, and it was only because of direct orders from Hitler and Himmler that the Wehrmacht finally turned a blind eye to what was going on behind their lines. Earlier in 1941, in Belaja Cerkov, Ukraine, the German Army had directly confronted Einsatzgruppen leaders concerning the fate of 90 children imprisoned in a house in unsanitary conditions and without proper provisions. When orders from the very top came down that they were to be executed, even the SS and Einsatzgruppen themselves did not want to do it, and it was eventually left to Ukrainian volunteers, who were by all accounts 'trembling with fear'! Bearing this in mind, I find it highly unlikely that any 'German soldier' would behave in such a manner, and if he did, German Army discipline being what it was, he would likely spend some time in prison. As for the baby 'crying weakly', I mean for God's sake! To be thus impaled and then hoisted up on the end of a rifle and carried down the street, would cause instant shock, unconsciousness and death. And how would the soldier carry it - on his shoulder? Then the blood would pour down onto his uniform, staining it, would it not? Was he drunk? Again, I would refer to German Army discipline. In any case, how would this alleged witness hear the faint gurgling of a dying infant, in the middle of a street, over the singing of a soldier, when she was far enough away from this individual not to be noticed by him? It is absolute rubbish and should not be repeated merely for cheap thrills. For Rhodes to relate the episode of the children in the house in detail, only for him to stoop to using third-hand, unsubstantiated, and quite honestly ridiculous, 'eyewitness' accounts - originating, by the way, from two of the most egregious Russian/Jewish propagandists of the era is very disappointing. It is noteworthy that German reports of Bolsheviks murdering children, and even nailing them to the walls (p.62), are labelled by Rhodes as 'atrocity stories, designed to motivate the men to kill'. Surely, it is the responsibility of historians to remain objective, regardless of the difficulty of the subject matter, and in this important duty Mr. Rhodes has failed. In order to better understand the crimes against humanity so prevalent in the 20th century, we need to look impartially at both sides rather than merely share the indignation of the victims. Finally, his overuse of descriptive adjectives, presumably to add colour, is also very unprofessional. Words like 'ugly' and 'brutal' often crop up, but when I read a line about one of Himmler's Chiefs of Staff being 'handsome' (p. 151) I was a bit shocked. That sort of unnecessary detail belongs in a romance novel, not a history book! Rhodes has obviously done a bit of research, but unfortunately, apart from names, numbers and dates, this has been very one-sided, and throughout the book there hangs an atmosphere of indignation and resentment which, combined with the rather lurid sensationalism of the text, starts to get a bit tiring. For these reasons, it is certainly not an academic text.

This is undoubtedly one of the most harrowing stories I have ever read. In detail, and with the forensic clinical objectivity of a trial lawyer prosecuting a clear-cut case, Richard Rhodes recounts the utter barbarity of the work of the SS Einsatzgruppen in eastern Europe during WW2. Unlike the impersonal, industrialised killing factories of Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka and other locations, the Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews, communists, Russian POWs, gypsies, invalids and basically anyone else who didn't fit into their racial utopia - all by hand, at close quarters. The sheer depravity of it all is still shocking 70+ years on - emptying entire towns and villages and systemically murdering up to 40,000 people a day by gunfire; forcing people to register their details, then stealing anything of value, then stripping them naked, and finally forcing them to line up in front of trenches or pits where they were shot and packed in like sardines (the Germans even had a word for this - Sardinenpackung). This included men, women, children and babies. One of the singly most upsetting parts of the book is a grainy photo of Jewish mothers and children, stripped naked and waiting in line to be shot - I am not easily upset but this brought tears to my eyes. And what is especially shocking is that (a) most of this was done by ordinary people, such as local village policemen, lawyers and even a former Catholic priest; and (b) that hardly any of the perpetrators of such mass murder were ever brought to justice. Rhodes has done the world a service in stripping this tale bare: we must never forget what happened.

One of the most important books about the Nazi genocide ever written. Powerful, shocking and very good on how even the most ordinary people can get involved in and commit atrocities and genocide if we are brainwashed, trained and brutalized to do so.Talks about the Einsatzgruppens, special tasks force role in the genocide in the East against the Poles, Russians and jews. This was the first phase of the Final solution where millions of men, womem and children were shot between 1941 and 1943.This is the forgotten holocaust of the Second World war. Should be required reading for all history students, politicians and anyone interested in why genocide takes place, It demonstrates how ordinary soldiers and policmen, including the Wermacht were conditioned to commit mass murder. An important, vivid and powerful description of the scale and enormity of the German crimes in the East. Well writte, concise clear and compelling history.In my view, one of the most important and compelling history books to describe how easy it is to involve ordinary people in the socialization of butchery and mass murder. Explains some of the rationale of mass murder and perhaps why the Japanese also did what they did in Nanking and the Rwanda massacres in Africa.. In summary, gruesome, graphic, chilling, but also very well written and morally a very significant book.Well done Richard Rhodes. You have done history and the explanation of what and why eveil takes place a great service. Brilliant.

For those who think they know about 'The Holocaust' and the role Himmler and the SS played in the persecution of the Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Christians and the like, this book is required reading. Richard Rhodes has obviously poured his heart and soul into getting the historical accuracy right and marrying that to the time-line of the killings but he also manages to include, amongst other things, Athen's theories of aggresssion and violence in an attempt to understand why the SS and the rest of the Einsatzgruppen could and did carry out these attrocities. Certain passages not only unsettled me - how women with babies were instructed to hold them above their heads in the killing pits so the baby and she could be shot at the same time by 2 different soldiers - to down right horror, which I shall not re-examine here. He also introduces to us the affects of that these groups have had on contemporary society - the role of the Mujos, who were Muslim SS brigades, who shot and tortured Christians in The Balkans - which partly explains the 'ethnic cleansing' which occured recently. This is not a page turner, rather I found myself revisiting various sections to gain a fuller understanding of how and whay happened but I found it an excellent study of this recent and particularly disturbing time.

When the abominations are focused behind wire fences of the death camps or death marches , the same satanic horrors are occurring as the Nazis Death Squads spread out towards The Soviet Union - if the ordinary German Wehrmacht soldier was sickened having been indoctrinated with Nazis ideology , can one imagine everybody else . This book is gripping , if you think after one page the horror can not get worse , it does . In many ways far greater in that era by the sheer numbers and types of killing weapons/methods than in todays world without wishing to lessen the trauma or sadness of a victim . Humanity and political leaders of the most powerful nations who were involved in this nightmare in the 1940s not learnt anything in todays horrors occurring in the Middle East,Africa,Ukraine .Powerful book having undertaken personal research and visited several of the Camps in Germany /Poland .

As told in many other reviews this book is hard to read, because of the detailed accounts of mass murder upon mass murder, including the shooting, drowning, clubbing to death, blowing up with dynamite and even live dissolving in chemicals of the sorry people not befit to live in the 3. Reich. One interesting point, which given the title of the book is one of the main points, is Rhodes theory, that the mass exterminations where taking such a toll on the mental health and morale of the executioners, who had to look every single victim in the eyes - including children of all ages - that another method of murder than shooting had to be found, a method enabling the killers to distance themselves from the victims, a method more tolerable to the killers. And the method finally chosen was gassing. Gassing was first used in killings of enabled people. When there were no more enabled to kill, the experts on gassing where available to the killing of Jews and Slavs. Mobile gas vans where used, but where unreliable. Stationary gas chambers and crematoriums became the solution to the problem, how to kill millions fast and dispose of the bodies. Disposing of the bodies is another horrific topic of the book. One way to kill and bury at the same time was the sardine packing. A pit is dug. A row of victims lie down on the bottom face down and are shot. A new row of victims lie down on the dead face down and are shot and so on. That way the killers do not have to look the victims in the eyes and there is no need to carry bodies, and the pit is filled in the most efficient way. One topic I would have liked Rhodes to cover in more detail is the knowledge and cooperation of the regular German army in the mass killings. But since the einsatzgruppen followed in close proximity of the army, and since the book cites many eye witnesses from army units, I guess most German soldiers knew what was happening in the lands conquered. However good soldiers the Germans may have been, this tarnishes their deeds. What they were in fact doing was making way for killers of infants.

This is perhaps the most shocking book I've read in a long time. I'm fully aware of the nature of the Nazi regime and its crimes (everyone should by now in fairness), we know about the camps, the second world war, the Nuremburg trials. But I wasn't fully aware of the relentless and wide ranging horror that the Nazis imposed the terratories they invaded after June 1941 in Eastern Europe and Russia. It the mind numbing list of communities, villages, towns, families (of course we are talking about Jews here) that were wiped out, 500 here, 3,000 there and then much larger massacres of 20-30,000. Also the large number of Germans and their local collaborators that participated in this crime, they number in the 10s of thousands, most of whom got off scott free after the war.

This book is a riveting read it is one of the most thought provoking of books I've read. How these men could do what they did like it was another day at the office beggars belief. A book that is just too hard to put down as you find yourself fascinated as to why and how this could happen.